Aside from pissing all over WeWork, which given their immense losses they probably deserve, This article could have been summed up in a couple of short sentence

Aside from pissing all over WeWork, which given their immense losses they probably deserve, This article could have been summed up in a couple of short sentences. There's a lot of words and effort going on here to make Kafka sound immensely complex (and dare I say Kafka-esque?) The article continually chides Kafka as overweight, hard to setup, complex, blah blah blah. None of these things are true in modern day deployments. Three instances of Kafka, Two ZK instances, and you're off and running. All of that will run in docker and the docker images will stand themselves up if you let them. You need even less for developemnt. Postgres is a bit more complex given that you've got to manage machine sizes and database schemas. But even with that being said, the article gets one thing right. For average data use, most any system will do and some startups are over-engineering their stacks.