It's really not. It's a distributed log. Because it's really a log and it's partitioned it has a whole host of issues that make it a very poor messaging system

It's really not. It's a distributed log. Because it's really a log and it's partitioned it has a whole host of issues that make it a very poor messaging system like hot partions, head of line blocking etc. If what you want is a proper messaging system where the underlying model is still a distributed log then you should look at Apache Pulsar. It can provide the same semantics as Kafka but can properly implement job queues and messaging semantics ala SQS, Google PubSub, et al.