It's really not that big a deal to administer Kafka at small scale. If you have to, you can run it on 3 machines, with ZK on the same nodes. I'd still run it

It's really not that big a deal to administer Kafka at small scale. If you have to, you can run it on 3 machines, with ZK on the same nodes. I'd still run it myself over Kinesis, even if I was a single-person startup.