As more businesses turn to events as a way to share data among microservices, collect analytics or feed data lakes, Apache Kafka has become a favorite platform to support an event-driven architectural style. Although Kafka was a revolutionary concept in scalable persistent messaging, a lot of moving parts are required to make it work, including ZooKeeper, brokers, partitions, and mirrors. While these can be particularly tricky to implement and operate, they do offer great flexibility and power when needed, especially at an industrial enterprise scale. Because of the high barrier to entry presented by the full Kafka ecosystem, we welcome the recent explosion of platforms offering the Kafka API without Kafka. Recent entries such as Kafka on Pulsar and Redpanda offer alternative architectures, and Azure Event Hubs for Kafka provides some compatibility with Kafka producer and consumer APIs. Some features of Kafka, like the streams client library, are not compatible with these alternative brokers, so there are still reasons to choose Kafka over alternative brokers. It remains to be seen, however, if developers actually adopt this strategy or if it is merely an attempt by competitors to lure users away from the Kafka platform. Ultimately, perhaps Kafka's most enduring impact could be the convenient protocol and API provided to clients.
