I've a non-competitive style when the matter is software :-) I simply think that Redis streams could be very useful, in some way I borrowed Kafka ideas, in other ways I totally refused the Kafka implementation / approach, and in general Redis streams have a lot of cons and pro at the same time in a mixed way, due to the total difference between Kafka end Redis. So I think it's the users that should apply the right tools for the right jobs, I'll avoid any comparison. I just gave Kafka credits in the Redis doc because certain ideas are clearly from Kafka or popularized by Kafka.
It was probably a bit too early for production use, but it worked perfectly!
One nice advantage of it vs. Kafka is that given that it's so lightweight, a Redis instance with streams can be dedicated to each customer with its own port and firewall setup and give you a really solid security story for clients who are paranoid about such things. (Kafka security is possible too of course...but harder to explain for a layman.)
Thanks antirez - it's great. I've written a python Redis iterator that I'm looking forward to PR'ing to the python client to encapsulate the XREAD timestamp tracking bit and manage timeouts.
Stream data type looks very interesting as well. Is the goal to be competitive to Kafka-like use-case?