Every time another startup falls for the Java + Kafka arguments, it keeps the AWS consultants happier.
Fast forward into 2025, there are many performant, efficient and less complex alternatives to Kafka that save you money, instead of burning millions in operational costs "to scale".
Unless you are at a hundred million dollar revenue company, choosing Kafka in 2025 is doesn't make sense anymore.
When I pitched Kafka to my backend team in 2018, I got pushback from the ops team who wanted me to use something AWS-native instead, i.e. Kinesis. A big part of why I doubled-down on Kafka is because it's vendor neutral and I can just run the actual thing locally.
Fast forward into 2025, there are many performant, efficient and less complex alternatives to Kafka that save you money, instead of burning millions in operational costs "to scale".
Unless you are at a hundred million dollar revenue company, choosing Kafka in 2025 is doesn't make sense anymore.