Why Was Apache Kafka Created?
25 points by topicpartition
25 points by topicpartition
We use kafka, and having to bolt on schema stuff is very odd. We have a lot of schema-less events as a result (yolo, I guess), and you can imagine there are problems that come with that.
So, yeah, I am surprised to learn in this article that schemas were part of the initial technical plans and not baked in. Anyone who uses a lot of kafka will end up reaching for them
It’s always a choice whether to use a schema or not. I am not sure it’s right to blame kafka for this.
I’d extend this to all domains where you don’t HAVE to use a schema, including receiving anything from a JSON API.
They can be blamed because the native tooling is either bad, or came 10y late, or doesn’t exist.
One would have expected to get some “easy but working” working feature in some version of kafka.
You can use schemas at any layer.
Many people use them for incoming JSON data from HTTPs. I can blame HTTP for not having schemas built in, or I can just use my own.