Comment by mrweasel

> people have been using it for all sorts of things for which it was not designed

Kafka is misused for some weird stuff. I've seen it used as a user database, which makes absolutely no sense. I've also seen it used a "key/value" store, which I can't imagine being efficient as you'd have to scan the entire log.

Part of it seems to stem from "We need somewhere to store X. We already have Kafka, and requesting a database or key/value store is just a bit to much work, so let's stuff it into Kafka".

I had a client ask for a Kafka cluster, when queried about what they'd need it for we got "We don't know yet". Well that's going to make it a bit hard to dimension and tune it correctly. Everyone else used Kafka, so they wanted to use it too.