[gattacamovie]

as some mentioned, there are benefits and there are costs applying the 'lift and shift' for big things like kafka (and elastic search, DBs, etc). The main assumption is that MOST of your apps (especially the ones affected by kafka access latency) run in k8s already. Access from outside should be mainly for:

a. integrations with other systems which do not have very strict latency constraints

b. replication to disaster recovery site

The benefits are listed (between lines) in both article and below.

Price is is usually still treating those pods like pets:

- one pod per k8s node (taints&node selectors) - special sizing & tunings of the targeted nodes (resources, kernel params, etc)

- one LB per Pod. yes, costly and against what you would expect, but that's what is required for a bullet proof deploy. (delay is not always there, especially in clouds, LB have super efficient implementations (especially gcp)

- bullet proof storage, with the required performance computed in your sizing phase.