Studying the ""how"" of Kafka makes you better at using Kafka, but studying its ""whys"" makes you better at so much more. In looking at the tradeoffs behind a system like Kafka, we learn to reason more clearly about distributed systems and to make high-stakes technology adoption decisions more effectively. These are skills we all want to improve! In this talk, we'll examine trade-offs on which our favorite distributed messaging system takes opinionated positions: - Whether to store data contiguously or using an index - How many storage tiers are best? - Where should metadata live? - And more. It's always useful to dissect a modern distributed system with the goal of understanding it better, and it's even better to learn to deeper architectural principles in the process. Come to this talk for a generous helping of both.
