For me, the baggage is mostly the complexity of the service. With that comes monitoring, maintenance, tuning, debugging and troubleshooting. Lessened somewhat

For me, the baggage is mostly the complexity of the service. With that comes monitoring, maintenance, tuning, debugging and troubleshooting. Lessened somewhat with SaaS products like Amazon Kinesis (technically not a Kafka, but close). Another "baggage" is that an event-driven setup is eventual-consistent -and async- by nature. If your software already is eventual-consistent, this is not a problem. But it is a huge change if you come from a blocking/simple "crud" setup.