[tapoxi]

I'd like to see these on OpenJDK 11, since that's what Confluent is running on and the author makes a point of switching to 17 even though he works for Confluent.

In either case, Confluent Platform is ridiculously expensive and approached the costs (licensing alone) for our entire cloud spend. I'd love to see more run-on-k8s alternatives to CFK.

[Lucasoato]

There's really no reason for Confluent to be so expensive, the pricing depends on so many factors that it's so easy to fuck up and receive stellar bills. Also the fact that they are releasing so many components with restrictive licenses, or that they postponed the Kafka tiered storage feature (that allows you to unload some of the topics data to S3 instead of expensive SSD disks) so that they could squeeze more money from their customers.

[agallego]

For long term storage I agree too. The reason we invented our byoc was so that (1) you own your storage and (2) we only charge you for value add

[jpgvm]

I really dislike the way Confluent has treated the Kafka ecosystem. It feels like they went out of their way to make OSS Kafka kludgy and then priced their enterprise offering completely out of the reach of anyone but Fortune 500.

I have been using Pulsar for new projects not because of performance or anything but because all the features you expect to be built-in are. Georeplication, shared-subscription w/selective ACK, schema registry etc.

Also it's wildly more pluggable, the authn/authz plugin infrastruction in particular is great. I was even able to write a custom Pulsar segment compactor to do GDPR deletions without giving up offloaded segment longevity.

The segment offload is actually huge especially because tools like Secor for Kafka are dead now and you are stuck on the Kafka Connect ecosystem which personally I really find distasteful.

[EdwardDiego]

KIP-405 is coming :) https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-405%3A...

[victor106]

I agree with Confluent pricing, we had the same experience. We switched to pub/sub and Azure Event hubs.

I don't even understand why Confluent should price their offering so high. ITs not like Real time is an exclusive service that other platforms don't have.

[pram]

Because they have stock they need to pump.

I've found talking to Confluent about anything is a complete waste of time unless it's a very specific technical issue. They're always pushing their cloud as the solution, and it's very aggressive.

[igetspam]

Really? We had the opposite experience. We got the impression that sales loves to sell against their cloud. Probably commission related.

[igetspam]

At my last org, we spent hundreds on confluent and then they did a pricing adjustment and our bill went up 4x. No exaggeration. We moves from kinesis to confluent because it was cheaper. After that, we moved back to save money.

[manquer]

There are serious limitations with azure event pub though, especially max number of topics .

We ended migrating to aiven after finding confluent pricing unreasonable.

[moulick]

Have you checked Strimzi for Kafka on k8s? it’s super good

[Lucasoato]

Strimzi is really great, creating a Debezium Change Data Capture system and seeing all topics and users as Kubernetes CRDs is just ordered and magic. The only downside is that Redpanda isn't yet supported in Strimzi, but when I met them at KubeCon last month they mentioned the possibility it might be supported in future :)