> Our Kafka setup started the way most things do in a fast-moving engineering team: pragmatically. > Every change required SSH and port-forwarding. Our Kafka i

> Our Kafka setup started the way most things do in a fast-moving engineering team: pragmatically. > Every change required SSH and port-forwarding. Our Kafka instances had no URL. You accessed them via localhost. That isn’t pragmatism, it’s lift-and-shifting your test environment into prod. You can in fact run stuff on VMs in a repeatable and sane way; it’s called Ansible + Packer (or any other similar combo you’d prefer).