Using Kafka is a powerhouse for any financial institution running on Microservices or handling massive data streams. Kafka offers speed, high tolerance, and stability in data transfer without choking databases or creating API bottlenecks.
However... the problem starts when Kafka becomes a trend, and companies race to use it out of hype, not business need.
The Disaster Begins
Kafka is not just a library you plug in. It is a full system requiring expertise, monitoring, configuration, understanding of partitions and consumer groups, and flow planning. If the team lacks experience, Kafka turns from a tool of power into a burden:
- High resource consumption for no reason.
- Infrastructure complexity that is hard to fix.
- Offset issues and consuming lag.
- Message accumulation and unnecessary topic bloat.
- Services building on it without needing it.
- Increased operational and monitoring costs.
The problem isn’t Kafka... it’s the misuse of Kafka. Not every system needs Kafka. Not every event must be a stream. Not every service needs to be asynchronous.
Sometimes REST is enough. Sometimes Redis Stream is better. Sometimes DB triggers or a simple message queue are lighter and easier.
When to use Kafka?
- Massive data volume.
- Inter-service communication requiring high resilience.
- Real-time event streaming.
- Logs requiring long-term storage.
- Replaying consumption without data loss.
Otherwise... Kafka becomes a cost to the team and the system.
"Use Kafka when it is a solution... not when it is a trend."