It's fine for streaming, i.e Spark and friends. I generally define streaming as the success of each individual message is entirely uniform, i.e the system can e

It's fine for streaming, i.e Spark and friends. I generally define streaming as the success of each individual message is entirely uniform, i.e the system can either process messages or it cannot. If this holds none of Kafkas drawbacks should significantly affect you. When people talk messaging they normally mean something lower latency, potentially out of order and where the success of each message is likely independent of other messages. For these use-cases Kafka is not well suited. For these cases you will want something like Pulsar, SQS, PubSub, etc.