Don’t make Apache Kafka your database
It’s a tale as old as time. An enterprise is struggling against the performance and scalability limitations of its incumbent relational database. Teams tasked with finding a newer solution land on an event-driven architecture, take one look at Apache Kafka, and say, “Aha! Here’s our new database solution.” It’s fast. It’s scalable. It’s highly available. It’s the superhero they hoped for!
Those teams set up Kafka as their database and expect it to serve as their single source of truth, storing and fetching all the data they could ever need. Except, that’s when the problems begin. The core issue is that Kafka isn’t actually a database, and using it as a database won’t solve the scalability and performance issues they’re experiencing.