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To be honest I think very many of us don't need Kafka. As with many other things as long as we aren't handling more than a few thousands messages/sec any decent ordinary nessage broker like ActiveMQ should do.

Caveat: do not install production message bus in a vm.

I recently listened to this talk which compares and explains very nicely: https://vimeo.com/181925293

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Kafka gives you vastly better delivery guarantees than the common ActiveMQ brokers.

If you put a message into Kafka and have it configured correctly, it will come out on the other end at least once. This is not the case for most of the competitors.

A lot of the time you don't need at-least once, so even picking a broker without support for it is not necessarily an issue.

And at-least once can be reasonably simply layered on top (require a response at a higher level layer) at a cost, so depending on your use-case, forgoing at-least once support in the broker can very well be the right choice.

This is so, but also consider the profile of traffic; if you have 10k messages s-1 on average you might rarely get lots and lost more.

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