[EdwardDiego]

Sure, but you can also go to a Slack channel and get help from the people who wrote the FOSS code you're using.

For free.

Yep, if your Kafka is mission critical and crashes hard, that is bad.

But things like Kafka are _never_ a black box you just spin up and never worry about, if anyone thinks so, CAP theorem will give them an awful surprise one day.

You're always going to need someone in your team who understands the tech and how to make best use of it.

MSK won't tell you how many partitions your topic needs, or whether your retention strategy should be delete, or compact, or both.

You still need that knowledge of the "managed" service to make effective use of it.

And that knowledge sits rather close to knowledge of how the system works, so given you'll need that knowledge anyway, may as well cultivate it instead.

Oh, and the operators also solve a lot of the unhappy paths too, FYI.

I tend to describe the operator approach as "half-managed" because things like multiple-AZ stretch clusters need some configuration.

But then, maybe you didn't want a 3-AZ cluster? Maybe a 2.5? MSK says no.

[sgarland]

> You're always going to need someone in your team who understands the tech and how to make best use of it.

…

> And that knowledge sits rather close to knowledge of how the system works, so given you'll need that knowledge anyway, may as well cultivate it instead.

This has been my argument forever, and it’s always met with disagreement, because entirely too many people have no desire to learn their tooling. They just want an API that they can push data into, and get it back out. What happens inside is irrelevant.

It’s extremely sad to me.

[redserk]

Or hold off on the academic-style pretentiousness and come back down to the real world.

At some point, we have to decide that there's a lot of knowledge expectations depending on your stack, especially as parts of your application grows.

Say you're a Python-based webapp running with Postgres, Kafka, and Elasticsearch. Your stack requires pretty decent knowledge of:

1. Postgres

2. Kafka

3. Elasticache

4. Linux (and a lot more than what many developers I've encountered seem to have)

5. Kubernetes, because it is 2024

6. Whatever frameworks you're doing with your webapp + ensuring you're keeping up with security best practices

7. + the soup involved with exposing your webapp to customers

Being able to handle any of these 6 at scale require different skillsets. It's unreasonable to expect anyone to be an expert at all of this -- in a real, tried-and-true environment -- especially with deadlines and SLAs involved.

[sgarland]

Counterpoint: stop the sprawl. Use boring technology.

Until you’re at quite a high scale, you probably don’t actually need Kafka. There are plenty of much lighter ways to do pub/sub, including Postgres itself.

Similarly, if your RDBMS schema is properly defined and your queries are well-written, you probably also don’t need Redis / EC.

Re: K8s, if you do need it, I’m not sure why people think that it’s so much easier to run EKS than your own cluster. The only thing you get to skip is the control plane; everything else is still your responsibility. Same with Postgres – you still are wholly responsible for its schema/table maintenance and optimization on major DBaaS.

In any case, nowhere did I say one person should be an expert at all of this.

[EdwardDiego]

> Until you’re at quite a high scale, you probably don’t actually need Kafka.

As someone who accidentally specialised in Kafka... ...bingo.

So many companies using it who don't need the sheer scale it offers, and get to pay the complexity cost anyway, with no benefits.

[akdev1l]

> Sure, but you can also go to a Slack channel and get help from the people who wrote the FOSS code you're using. > > For free.

Relying on volunteer support of varying degrees of quality for your business sounds insane.

Also at that point the business should really be donating or contributing to the development of the software otherwise it is considered what we call a dick move.

[EdwardDiego]

People within my company do contribute to the development of the FOSS software we rely on :)

> Relying on volunteer support of varying degrees of quality for your business sounds insane.

Given my experiences of Confluent paid support, and my experiences of the volunteer support around Kafka, I disagree.

[CPLX]

> For free

Not sure we agree on the meaning of this phrase in this context.

[EdwardDiego]

If you ever hit an issue with Kafka or Strimzi, go to their Slack, some of the most intelligent people I've ever had the privilege to work alongside will be there, helping you.

For 0 money. That kinda free.

[oh_fiddlesticks]

I would prefer to say "free of charge", because that support is not actually free, it has a cost, you're just not required to pay for it.

But you as well as I know, that what the other participant in this conversation means, is that if a for-profit entity relies on support that is "free of charge" in this way, such that it can continue to profit on the back of their product support, then the for-profit entity really ought to seriously consider a voluntary donation of some kind to support the continued maintenance and support of the product.

[EdwardDiego]

My company contributes to FOSS projects we use :)

[nobleach]

And while that's super awesome that someone feels passionately enough about a piece of tech - that they're willing to spend their precious resources helping others... that kind of charity is untenable. You can't expect that person to be there at 3am when systems are down and your nightly processing jobs are failing.

[redserk]

I am expected to produce business value at the end of the day and I wear multiple hats. Paying someone to be the expert in the room is the best value sometimes.

I’d rather focus on my expertise and mental energy in other tools that are much more significant to the stack I support.