Kafka is a fine replacement for a RDBMS if it fits your particular use case. It has very strong data consistency guarantees - stronger than most RDBMS - if you

Kafka is a fine replacement for a RDBMS if it fits your particular use case. It has very strong data consistency guarantees - stronger than most RDBMS - if you configure it properly (acks=1 et al). It won't even lose data if the leader of a partition crashes during a commit. It has been explicitly designed for these use cases and even has features like compaction: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#compaction https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/#compaction Now, I agree with you that in most cases, using Kafka as your primary data store instead of a RDBMS is madness - but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea in general.