[EdwardDiego]

> we paid upfront for Confluent's enterprise feature version to get us out of the immediate bind we had in 2020.

Definitely agree it's an essential feature for large datasets - in the past I've used Kafka Connect to stream data to S3 for longer term retention, but it's something else to manage, and getting data back into a topic if needed can be a bit painful.

[lizthegrey]

getting to just use the same consistent API without rewriting clients was AMAZING.

[rad_gruchalski]

This always reminds me of this thing I’ve written some time ago : https://gruchalski.com/posts/2021-04-02-kafka-infinite-reten...