The vast majority of "Kafka problems" (or rather "Kafka Streams problems") we have with a managed solution at work are due to not fully understanding how it wor

The vast majority of "Kafka problems" (or rather "Kafka Streams problems") we have with a managed solution at work are due to not fully understanding how it works and how to set it up. There's so much stuff you can configure and so much potential to misuse it. Typical problems are wrong configuration for acks, not understanding durability guarantees, not understanding exactly-once semantics, not naming hidden topics in Kafka Streams, not using schema registry serializers for hidden topics, choosing the wrong partitioning scheme (and wanting to change it later), using Kafka clients with different hash functions, using wrong schema compatibility mode, etc. etc.