[convolvatron]

I agree that Kafka is alot of machinery for a fairly limited gain. but I really dislike this whole notion of 'antipattern', as if we can look at thing and assign a decontextualized thumbs up or down. that building systems is just a matter of assembling the right patterns, and avoiding the antipatterns.

[BoorishBears]

Sometimes a technology or pattern can be poisonous in a very specific way that warrants a label: when they're most alluring to those least equipped to leverage them.

Just like microservices, you cross the activation energy to want Kafka very easily because it's appealing on résumés, sounds like a hedge against scale,etc.

But there's a huge asymmetry in understanding the drawbacks to them. When you spin up these systems, the drawbacks don't hit you immediately, it feels like they're solving the problem you had, and it's not until you've invested immense amounts of sweat capital (and literal capital) that you discover how badly you screwed up.

You need some way to match that low effort value prop with a low friction warning: this is not a panacea for your problems. It only seems simple, it's not simple, it will hurt you unless know it will hurt you and simply have the resources and scale to play through that hurt.

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To me that warning is what's implied by "antipattern", it's not never use this, it's never use this unless you know why you should never use this.

[jshen]

I agree completely. Kafka, and event based architectures, are highly overused, but are also the right thing sometimes. It's FAR easier to manage an architecture where systems call into the source of truth for a given piece of data via APIs, and you should only switch to an event model if you truly need to.