The linked article now includes a giant disclaimer on top more or less retracting the view expressed in the title. Please update the title to accurately reflect the linked content. Also note that the author is mostly griping because of issues which no longer exist. I've posted the author's words below:<p>"Update, September 2016<p>OK, you can pretty much ignore what I wrote below this update, because it doesn't really apply anymore.<p>I wrote this over a year ago, and at the time I had spent a couple of weeks trying to get Kafka 0.8 working with .NET and then Node.js with much frustration and very little success. I was rather angry. It keeps getting linked, though, and just popped up on Hacker News, so here's sort of an update, although I haven't used Kafka at all this year so I don't really have any new information.<p>In the end, we managed to get things working with a Node.js client, although we continued to have problems, both with our code and with managing a Kafka/Zookeeper cluster generally. What made it worse was that I did not then, and do not now, believe that Kafka was the correct solution for that particular problem at that particular company. What they were trying to achieve could have been done more simply with any number of other messaging systems, with a subscriber reading messages off and writing them to some form of persistent storage (like Elasticsearch). I'm sure there are issues of scale or whatever where Kafka makes sense.<p>It is true, as many people have pointed out in the comments, that my primary problem was the lack of a good Kafka client for .NET. If I'd been able to install a Kafka Nuget package and it had just worked, this would never have been written. But I couldn't. Today I could probably use a thin wrapper around librdkafka, and if I ever have to work with Kafka from .NET again, that's probably what I'll do. C/C++ libraries are great for stuff like that: C can talk to anything, and everything can talk to C. Yay.<p>I do understand the performance-related reasons that drove the decision to design a clever-client architecture, but it was, apparently, extremely difficult to create a good client unless you were working with either Java, or with a lower-level language such as C or Go which could work with the complex protocols and implementation requirements.<p>So, anyway, like I said, you can ignore the stuff below which was written about an old version of the software, while I was in a very bad mood. But I'm going to leave it here, in the hopes that it may serve as a warning to future developers of really complicated infrastructure components. It probably won't, though."