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Keep an eye out for Northguard. It's the name of LinkedIn's rewrite of Kafka that was announced at a stream processing meetup about a week ago.

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It solves some issues, and creates some, since Northguard isn’t compatible with the current Kafka ecosystem.

As such, you can no longer use existing software that is built on Kafka as-is. It may not be a grave concern for LinkedIn, but it could be for others that currently benefit from using the existing Kafka ecosystem.

Yeah, it's definitely a significant shift. The Xinfra component helps with Kafka compatibility, but that still has quite a bit of complexity to it. Also, it's written in C++, so that requires a different mindset to operate.

I understood Xinfra to not use the Kafka protocol as its API.

As such, even with Xinfra deployed, you have to rewrite all the software that connects to Kafka, regardless of programming language.

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