How Kubernetes And Kafka Will Get You Fired

I get to see a lot of companies, their infrastructure and their systems architecture through my consulting activities. Over the past 10 years both Kubernetes and Apache Kafka have become extremely common and popular in many businesses. And very often not for the good.

Kubernetes and Kafka: Dream team or horror show?

How it all starts most of the time

The CEO of a medium-sized software company, whom I knew for some years, called me up one day asking for advice. His SaaS offering was running okay and had seen solid commercial success over the last decades. They had successfully transitioned from a desktop software product for Windows to a sophisticated web-based SaaS product with a modern event-driven microservices architecture. He himself wrote the original product in the mid 90s and as the decades passed by somewhat lost track of the technical development. Nevertheless, the product looked good and as he explained it, it seemed to be a very well architected and professional product. To be honest, I was a bit lost on why he called me up.

I asked him “what’s the matter, why do you ask me?”. C-Level Executives that are not too deep into their development, infrastructure and systems usually have a gut feel when something does not seem to be going into the right direction. In many cases they just want me to review it and want some external…