This is likely the best advice in practice as the complexity kafka introduces really only becomes apparent at scale. We ran managed services for our primary pro

This is likely the best advice in practice as the complexity kafka introduces really only becomes apparent at scale. We ran managed services for our primary production in the 50k+ RPS range that needed a constant stream of tweaking. On the other hand, the isolated EU cluster was self hosted and ran without incident or intervention for 18 months at 1-3k RPS.