One way it can be a foot gun is: To ensure ordering, systems like these have to block consumption on any given partition until it gets an ACK. If publishers of

One way it can be a foot gun is: To ensure ordering, systems like these have to block consumption on any given partition until it gets an ACK. If publishers of the data don't understand that, they can publish with too coarse a partition key which greatly decreases the amount of concurrent consumption you can have. Not knocking how these systems work, it's more that people generally don't "read the fine print", especially these days with cloud services.