[excuses_]

I wonder if Redpanda thinks about or offers some alternative protocol that would be better defined in terms of transaction guarantees. At this point it looks like Kafka’s protocol was a nice try but it needs a major refactoring.

[rystsov]

Documentation is a bit confusing: the protocol was evolved over time (new KIPs) and there is mismatch between the database model and kafka model. But we see a lot of potential in the Kafka transactional protocol.

At Redpanda we were able to push to 5k distributed transactions cross replicated shard. It's a mind-blowing for a database to achieve the same result.

Also Kafka transactional protocol works at low level it's very easy to build systems on top of it. For example, it's very easy to build a Calvin inspired system http://cs.yale.edu/homes/thomson/publications/calvin-sigmod1...