> To which the retort can be many: they might be building for the future - to integrate more systems, they might have fan-out use cases, they might want to have

> To which the retort can be many: they might be building for the future - to integrate more systems, they might have fan-out use cases, they might want to have a log to replay in case of disasters - so on and so forth. All well documented and very valid use cases of Kafka. WeWork has very predictable scale because its data ingestion needs are tied to expensive investments in physical capital. They don't have to worry about getting slashdotted. Same thing at my company, where data needs are tied to expensive enterprise contracts. In fact, we're considering Kafka for something we do, but it didn't sneak up on us--we knew for years that a particular use case involved a lot of data and wasn't ideal for a relational database.