I'm not a Kafka user but it seems very similar to my experience running Elasticsearch clusters tuned for low latency response time. There's a complicated mix o

I'm not a Kafka user but it seems very similar to my experience running Elasticsearch clusters tuned for low latency response time. There's a complicated mix of requirements for CPU, memory, disk, _and_ network speed, and meeting all of them cost effectively is a real challenge. Similarly, it's easy to build a cluster that performs well until a single node fails. The increased load per node plus the CPU and network cost of replicating data to a replacement instance can really cause trouble. Elasticsearch also runs on the JVM so I'm hoping the new EC2 instance types will work for us too. They look to be really great.