It’s no coincidence! Apache Kafka is named after Franz Kafka. From Wikipedia:

> Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka

Jay Kreps is an extremely well read man; the reference is surely ironic. Enterprise middleware, after all, is and always has been a bureaucratic rigmarole.

The nightmare has existed since the first ETL job was written, but by democratizing pub/sub access throughout companies, we can't help but be horrified by what we see going on in the dataplane. Apache Kafka, rather than creating this nightmare, brings light to it, just as Franz Kafka's literature brought light to the absurdity of life under evil bureaucracies.

Now he can't quite say this outright lest he offend some set of his customers who have to live in this reality, so we have that vague quote about "he's one of my favorite writers", but surely we can take a direct literary reference as a wink and a nod and read between the lines?

> evil bureaucracies

I think Kafka's point is that those bureaucracies are not evil, just uncaring. Which makes the end results even more sinister, as you get crushed through no clear malicious act.

This is a great description. Sums up well my thoughts about Kafka but that I hadn't verbalised.

But, but, the irony! https://qr.ae/pNKM3k

> Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime ... Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works ... but Brod ignored these instructions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

Damn, I thought did his friend execute him?! That is very Kafka-esque. But no, his friend was the executor of Kafkas' last will.

In my experience Apache Kafka is indeed a real world incarnation of that Kafkaesque bureaucratic rigmarole that he described in his novel 'The Castle'.

The domain name is a clue

my first reaction was to assume kafka-the-technology exectly because of the domain name. Then i realized that the one i meant was the "New York Times", and not the "New Yorker". NYT is one of the case studies from a kafka provider [0] skimming is a double-edged sword

[0]: https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...

You’re right. I should have examined more carefully.

“Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable for the whole business of software engineering.

Or Life

I was trying to figure out why the New Yorker would care about data streams

I saw the domain name and thought it was some journalist using Kafka as a pseudonym, to comment on current world events.

I was feeling lucky... either way

I thought it was about resque, the ruby queuing library, switching from redis to kafka.

One could look at the website name. Usually it helps to guess before you open it. For example, the likelihood of Newyorker writing an article on an open-source stream-processing software is low.

And line 3 in the article mentions Prometheus

Same here. I was wondering if the New Yorker had a new tech section.

The source is the world famous The New Yorker.

That alone will tell you which one.