Comment by pphysch

> 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).

I am not sure about this taxonomy. K8s, systemd, and (I would add) the Linux kernel are all taking on the ambitious task of central, automatic orchestration of general purpose computing systems. It's an extremely complex problem and I think all those technologies have done a reasonably good job of choosing the right abstractions to break down that (ever-changing) mess.

People tend to criticize projects with huge scope because they are obviously complex, and complexity is the enemy, but most of the complexity is necessary in these cases.

If Kafka's goal is to be a general purpose "operating system" for generic data systems, then that explains its complexity. But it's less obvious to me that this premise is a good one.