[PeterCorless]

The only thing that might take "weeks" is procrastination. Presuming absolutely no background other than general data engineering, a decent beginner online course in Kafka (or Redpanda) will run about 1-2 hours.

You should be able to install within minutes.

[kragen]

I mean, setting up Zookeeper, tweaking the kernel settings, configuring the hardware, the kind of stuff mentioned in guides like https://medium.com/@ankurrana/things-nobody-will-tell-you-se... and https://dungeonengineering.com/the-kafkaesque-nightmare-of-m.... Apparently you can do without Zookeeper now, but that's another choice to make, possibly doing careful experiments with both choices to see what's better. Much more discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37036291.

None of this applies to Redpanda.

[PeterCorless]

True. Redpanda does not use Zookeeper.

Yet to also be fair to the Kafka folks, Zookeeper is no longer default and hasn't been since April 2025 with the release of Apache Kafka 4.0:

"Kafka 4.0's completed transition to KRaft eliminates ZooKeeper (KIP-500), making clusters easier to operate at any scale."

Source: https://developer.confluent.io/newsletter/introducing-apache...

[kragen]

Right, I was talking about installing Kafka, not installing Redpanda. Redpanda may be perfectly fine software, but bringing it up in that context is a bit apples-and-oranges since it's not open-source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45748426

[EdwardDiego]

Good on you for being fair in this discussion :)