But for goodness’ sake, don’t

Engineers are constantly on the lookout for ways of doing more with less. This post a gentle reminder that less, contrary to the cliché, is not always more.

I am cheerfully reminded of an old Top Gear episode, in which the protagonists get £10,000 each to buy a used, mid-engined Italian supercar for a drive from Bristol to a Gentleman’s club in Slough. In a classical Top Gear fashion, carnage ensues: Hammond goes for a rust bucket Ferrari 308 GT4, Clarkson buys an “unstoppable” Maserati Merak (with brakes that had seen better days), and May brings in a Lamborghini Urraco that is broken down right from the start (arriving on the back of a truck, owing to temperamental electrics). The episode really delivers — from an entertainment point of view. The cars themselves were genuinely awful; none making it through to the end of filming.

You may think, he’s getting off his rails. What does all this have to do with databases and Kafka? Well, for starters, the episode was aired in 2011, which is the same year that Kafka was released by LinkedIn. But I promise you, it’s not that.

#apache-kafka #database #microservices