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What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

morling.dev

31–40 of 229 posts

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#32

I feel like everyone's journey with Kafka ends up being pretty similar. Initially, you think "oh, an append-only log that can scale, brilliant and simple" then you try it out and realize it is far, far, from being simple.

Yeah...

It took 4 years to properly integrate Kafka into our pipelines. Everything, like everything is complicated with it: cluster management, numerous semi-tested configurations, etc.

My final conclusion with it is that the project just doesn't really know what it wants to be. Instead it tries to provide everything for everybody, and ends up being an unbelievably complicated mess.

You know, there are systems that know what they want to be (Amazon S3, Postres, etc), and then there are systems that try to eat the world (Kafka, k8s, systemd).

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#33

I wish there is a global file system with node local disks, which has rule driven affinity to nodes for data. We have two extremes, one like EFS or S3 express which doesn't have any affinity to the processing system, and other what Kafka etc is doing where they have tightly integrated logic for this which makes systems more complicated.

I might be misunderstanding but isn't this like, literally what GlusterFS used to do?

Like distinctly recall running it at home as a global unioning filesystem where content had to fully fit on the specific device it was targeted at (rather then being striped or whatever).

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#34

> When producing a record to a topic and then using that record for materializing some derived data view on some downstream data store, there’s no way for the producer to know when it will be able to "see" that downstream update. For certain use cases it would be helpful to be able to guarantee that derived data views have been updated when a produce request gets acknowledged, allowing Kafka to act as a log for a tru…

Writing directly to the datastore ignores the need for queuing the writes. How do you solve for that need?

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#35

Surprised there's no mention of Redpanda here.

Having used both Kafka and Redpanda on several occasions, I'd pick Redpanda any day of the week without a second thought. Easier to setup, easier to maintain, a lot less finicky ans uses a fraction of the resources.

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#36
post #34

> When producing a record to a topic and then using that record for materializing some derived data view on some downstream data store, there’s no way for the producer to know when it will be able to "see" that downstream update. For certain use cases it would be helpful to be able to guarantee that derived data views have been updated when a produce request gets acknowledged, allowing Kafka to act as a log for a tru…

Writing directly to the datastore ignores the need for queuing the writes. How do you solve for that need?

Why do you need to queue the writes?

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#37

> When producing a record to a topic and then using that record for materializing some derived data view on some downstream data store, there’s no way for the producer to know when it will be able to "see" that downstream update. For certain use cases it would be helpful to be able to guarantee that derived data views have been updated when a produce request gets acknowledged, allowing Kafka to act as a log for a tru…

The problem is that you don't know who's listening. You don't want all possible interested parties to hammer the database. Hence the events in between. Arguably, I'd not use Kafka to store actual data, just to notify in-flight.

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#39

I feel like everyone's journey with Kafka ends up being pretty similar. Initially, you think "oh, an append-only log that can scale, brilliant and simple" then you try it out and realize it is far, far, from being simple.

Yeah... It took 4 years to properly integrate Kafka into our pipelines. Everything, like everything is complicated with it: cluster management, numerous semi-tested configurations, etc. My final conclusion with it is that the project just doesn't really know what it wants to be. Instead it tries to provide everything for everybody, and ends up being an unbelievably complicated mess. You know, there are systems that k…

systemd knows very well what it wants to be, they just don't tell anyone.

it's real goal is to make Linux administration as useless as windows so RH can sell certifications.

tell me the output of systemctl is not as awful as opening the windows service panel.

Re: What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?

#40
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but you can literally rebuild Kafka via AI right now in record time using the steps detailed at https://ghuntley.com/z80.

I'm currently building a full workload scheduler/orchestrator. I'm sick of Kubernetes. The world needs better -> https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1915677858867105862

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