Exactly, and if you /really/ wanted to, you could run a one node Kafka "cluster" using data replication of one instead of three for topics. I totally get the fu

Exactly, and if you /really/ wanted to, you could run a one node Kafka "cluster" using data replication of one instead of three for topics. I totally get the fun of creating something from scratch, but you introduce far more complexity and burden to your stack when you create something that needs the durability of a file system.