Confluent (the company housing the core Kafka team) has created a Helm chart to get their platform (either the open source version or the entire enterprise stack) deployed on Kubernetes.

Blog post here: https://www.confluent.io/blog/getting-started-apache-kafka-k...

I am about to embark in this journey, maybe. Have been working with Kubernetes for quite sometime to the point where I'm fairly comfortable managing it, tweaking it and fine tuning it. Business demands something like Kafka but I'm not sure if I'm inflicting into on-call nightmare if I go with Kafka on Kubernetes. Thoughts?

I would also encourage you to take a look at NATS which, like Kubernetes, is hosted by CNCF.

https://landscape.cncf.io/category=streaming-messaging&forma...

You might want to check out strimzi[1]. They've got a couple quickstarts for minikube or okd to help get folks up and running.

[1] - https://strimzi.io/

This looks interesting. Seems to be a bit more of a generic Kafka installation compared to the Confluence option. The fact that it makes it easy to run with Minikube is definately a plus.

Please look at http://pulsar.apache.org/ which is multiple fold better than kafka on scaling as well as easy to operate