[twa927]

I skimmed over it but it's again mostly about internal design. The high level use case I see is "publish-subscribe" which is handled by RabbitMQ and a dozen of other solutions.

One use case I see is that the events published into Kafka are persisted so e.g. some component can see a history of some events (so this is something not handled by RabbitMQ). Is it right?

[lllr_finger]

Event streams between decoupled systems is kind of the sweet spot for Kafka. It's extremely easy to scale horizontally, and handles distributed work and network partitions in an easy to reason about way. I've also seen Rabbit be the bottleneck before where I've never really seen Kafka be the bottleneck in an architecture - it's very analogous to a firehose. For organizations shuttling messages and events between teams, it makes a very convenient lingua franca.

[chrisjc]

I often do the same thing... skim through articles and papers to get the gist. Trust me, this is one to ready all the way through.

[Plugawy]

That's correct - being able to "rewind" a history of a topic (queue) is a powerful concept. But, Kafka is a bit harder to operate than RabbitMQ in my experience. (Somewhat related, one of our subsystems originally was built around Kafka, but later was migrated to RabbitMQ and Postgres)