Full disaggregation of compute and storage is the right direction. Let storage handle replication, it's getting good, global, low latency, cheaper (like with S3

Full disaggregation of compute and storage is the right direction. Let storage handle replication, it's getting good, global, low latency, cheaper (like with S3 Express). Kafka becomes a smart data ingester and router: it moves bytes, enforces ordering, does minimal buffering. That's it. Do one thing well. You get a system simpler to operate, to scale, and more flexible; data could be consumed outside of Kafka itself (in a batch way typically), without duplicating the data, that's a big win.