[620gelato]

That's a good tradeoff I suppose. I've been racking my brain trying to find a solution recently that solves both of these but haven't been able to.

What I had landed on was idempotency on a best effort basis and just made the event processing safely retryable without violating any system invariants.

[mrkeen]

Too much work. Don't try to act as the sender yourself. The outbox pattern leaves that as an exercise for the reader. How many receivers do you have? Do they come and go while you're trying to send messages? Do they need to find out about old messages that were send before they came online?

There is much better alternative than this motte-and-bailey argument of "outbox GUARANTEES blah for a distributed system - but only within a single node".

Just write down what happened in Kafka. N followers read from Kafka to find out what happened.

Kafka is actually distributed tech. You can lose nodes and keep operating.

No need to design for atomicity. You either wrote to Kafka or you didn't.