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gethlytoday at 2:18 PM2 repliesview on HN

I never understood the popularity of Kafka. It's just a queue with persistent storage(ie. not in-memory queu with ram-size limited capacity) after all.


Replies

mrkeentoday at 3:33 PM

A queue with persistent storage is like a ledger whose entries don't vanish when you read them, or a git branch whose commits stick around for longer than 24-72 hours.

It's popular because it didn't have any competition while it built up its ecosystem. And even though there's competitors now, I haven't had time to check them out, and they still brand themselves as "Kafka-alternatives".

sumtechguytoday at 3:06 PM

Most of the other ones at the time it was pop and the data was gone. You had to jump thru some hoops to make it work as persistent. Not 'hard' but just more annoying. Kafka has that out of the box. Where kafka starts to come apart is how to set it up. Its configuration is a bit tedious to setup.