[lkrubner]

About this:

"You seem to be caught up in some hype around Kafka"

I hope you realize that when I mention Kafka I am merely offering it as an example, and the reason why I mention it is because it is the technology that Jay Kreps talks about in the essay that I linked to.

It is absolutely true that are many types of unified logs, and some successful companies have been built around different kinds of logs. For instance, at https://www.parse.ly/ (an analytics firm) their canonical source of truth is their Nginx logs. They have kept every Nginx log since the company was founded in 2009. Parsely also uses Kafka and Cassandra, but if someone accidentally deleted all of their Kakfa data, and all its backups, and all of their Cassandra data, all of its backups, they could regenerate all of their customers data simply by re-analyzing the Nginx logs, going back to 2009.

So there are different approaches to the notion of a unified log. And I mentioned Kafka only as an example. I apologize if that was unclear.