[sologoub]

In addition to what others have stated, it’s also a question of productivity - when your team has to maintain ops, you are not doing something else. Is it your highest and best use to be tuning and maintaining Kafka? It could be, but only you and your team can really answer that.

In practice, it’s better to offload things that are not core to what your company is making money on, until you hit constraint points from scaling. As one of the comments mentioned, at PB-scale processing, even bare metal may make sense. (But not always - one of my former employers went down this path early and ended up losing all productivity in R&D because of people fighting to keep that baremetal setup alive for months on end. This really hurt future revenue growth and distracted eng. leadership from key changes in their industry.)

Like with most complex questions, the immediate answer is “it depends”.