From the article: "The overhead in setting up Kafka versus a very hefty Postgres is enormous, because distributed systems are hard...". If you need a message q

From the article: "The overhead in setting up Kafka versus a very hefty Postgres is enormous, because distributed systems are hard...". If you need a message queue what is the alternative to Kafka? In my application I needed to update my Lucene search index when data (stored in flat files) is updated. I need a queue in between, so I evaluated available solutions: RabbitMQ and Kafka, and I picked Kafka. Another place I need a message queue is for notifications. When an item is updated lots of users may need to be notified and I didn't want this processing to happen synchronously so I used Kafka in between. My application is running in a Kubernetes cluster, and I have Kafka running in a container. Never had any problems. Based on my experience I don't hesitate to recommend Kafka even for simple applications. The only negative I noticed that resource requirements are high compared to everything else I am running.