It starts out with that title trying to piggyback on Marc Andressen's famous article. Then by 1/3 of the way through, it's full on "Apache Kafka® and its uses".<p>I feel cheated. I was ready to defend the non-software companies of the world, but the article has very little to do with the title. It seems like just an ad.
> That is, the core processes a business executes—from how it produces a product, to how it interacts with customers, to how it delivers services—are increasingly specified, monitored, and executed in software.<p>When I think of businesses I think of the local auto repair shop, the restaurant around the corner, the paving company working on the roads, the local HVAC company around the corner from me, and the local gyms.<p>The core products at the boot camp workout place across the street from me don't need to be specified, monitored, or executed in software.<p>Somehow this reminded me that empathy is decreasing in society (you can search on it). Putting more computers between businesses and people isn't necessarily going to be better for people or the way we interact with each other.
Literally all of vsyu's posts are submission links to either confluent or buzzsprout talking about Apache Kafka. No comments, just banal advertisement.
They say software but then the article is about databases, event streams, and networked communication.<p>But they leave out the other big part of running a company, which is getting the low-paid worker drones to show up on time and make the company money.
While I mostly agree with Jay Kreps, I believe that the upfront costs of event sourcing systems are way higher than traditional ones.<p>Kafka itself seems to have minimum hardware requirements way above something like a single-node Mongo or Postgres installation, let alone the infrastructure to create projections.
True for a lot of industries. Unfortunately, there are two corporate responses to this: 1) Software is a strategic competitive advantage and market differentiator and 2) Software is a cheap commodity that can be outsourced and cobbled together from lowest-bidder parts.<p>Not only do both attitudes exist at different companies but, in my experience, a single company can flip between "software is our secret sauce!" to "let's focus on our core strengths and outsource the rest!" in a heartbeat depending on what the venture capitalists say that week.<p>Using some SAAS is often smart and useful but if you're outsourcing your core business processes and new development for the sake of short-term efficiency, you're handing the keys of innovation for your company over to somebody else.