[bkirwi]

Yes, Kafka certainly is good at those things, and I suspect Kafka will only get better at them. But it's actually quite a simple bit of infrastructure at heart[0] and this means it's useful for a large variety of other things, many of which we're only figuring out now.

Re: optimistic locking... there are a couple proposals for this floating around, and I'm not sure which / if one will get in. It certainly seems consistent with the general mission, though.

[0] http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what...