Apache Kafka replacement and beyond. This is open-core Streamlio’s claim to fame, and today’s announcement of a managed cloud service brings it one step closer to reality.

Brand new, you’re retro.

This Tricky aphorism of a song came to mind once more a couple of years back, when Streamlio came out of stealth. Streamlio is an offering for real-time data processing based on a number of Apache open source projects, and it directly competes with Confluent and Apache Kafka, which is at the core of Confluent’s offering. What’s the point in doing that?

In 2017, Apache Kafka was generally considered an early adopter thing: Present in many whiteboard architecture diagrams, but not necessarily widely adopted in production in enterprises. Since then, Kafka has laid a claim to enterprise adoption, and Confluent has acquired open-core unicorn status after its latest funding. This does not make things easier for the competition, obviously.

The question remains then: Why would anybody do this, and how could it work? Streamlio’s answer to the why part seems to be that, despite being new for some, Kafka is retro. As to the how: Any offering seeking to position itself as a Kafka alternative would have to be substantially faster/more reliable, while also being compatible with Kafka and offering the options that Kafka offers.

Read the full article on ZDNet