Apache Kafka 0.8.0 released

Have read a bit of the intro material, but I'm still not grokking what makes Kafka fundamentally different from ActiveMQ / Apollo. Can anyone sum up where and why one might need Kafka?

Kafka is an integral part of Shopify&#x27;s infrastructure. It&#x27;s brilliant but under appreciated technology.<p>A full company, scalable event bus like this can totally revolutionize the way you build services.

This is the first release as an Apache top-level project and represents many months of hard work.<p>A few of the major improvements (from <a href="https://archive.apache.org/dist/kafka/0.8.0/RELEASE_NOTES.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.apache.org&#x2F;dist&#x2F;kafka&#x2F;0.8.0&#x2F;RELEASE_NOTES.ht...</a>):<p><pre><code> * Intra-cluster replication support * Support multiple data directories * Many new internal metrics * Time based log segment rollout </code></pre> Plus many bug fixes and other improvements.

May I ask how Kafka compares with an AMQP solution such as RabbitMQ? Thank you.

I wrote about this release and Kafka in general in Chinese and gather some information perhaps useful for Chinese guys: <a href="http://geek.csdn.net/news/detail/3866" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geek.csdn.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;detail&#x2F;3866</a>

This has nothing to do with the software itself, but it bothers me: Why do you call a &quot;high-throughput distributed messaging system&quot; Kafka? Kafka&#x27;s stories essentially describe the polar-opposite: crippled, ineffective, labyrinthine message systems that are exceedingly hierarchical in nature. They are also rather user-unfriendly, i.e. their users usually die horrible, lonely deaths. Am I just missing the in-joke here, and it&#x27;s called Kafka <i>because</i> it is exactly the opposite of this, or did somebody overdo the hipster naming scheme?

Congratulations to the Kafka team! Their work is always extremely impressive.

Was this developed in Scala?

I like the naming trend and expect releases of Apache Ionesco, Apache Lovecraft, and Apache Poe real soon now. &lt;&#x2F;obligatory-joke&gt;

Finally!

Why is it written in Java? Isn&#x27;t it a default performance hit? I&#x27;d expect such frameworks to be written in high performance languages.