Welp, here's a dissenting opinion - it's not.

I've run self-managed, sorta managed (MSK), fully managed (Confluent Cloud), and somewhat managed (Strimzi).

It is complex, yes, but it solves a very complicated problem. The issue tends to arise when people use it when simpler alternatives exist for their problem.

> I'm thinking about giving a try to RabbitMQ

We went the opposite route. Kafka has been much better. Up to a certain volume, both solved the problem. When RabbitMQ required too much tuning, a decision was made to go to Kafka, and it's been stellar.

Both are pretty good, but understand that there are too many variables involved and you can't really escape production hell indefinitely, regardless of what you pick. What changes is when you are going to see the flames, and what is going to spark them.

I've had an excellent experience using the Rust NATS client!

I pump time series data through NATS running on a Raspberry Pi, which is part of a 3D printer monitoring and event/automation system. I also use NATS as an MQTT broker, for compatibility with other software in the 3D printer ecosystem.

FWIW I also have lots of experience running large Kafka and Rabbitmq fleets. The choice between these technologies depends on what you're optimizing for.

Have you tried Pulsar or Redpanda? Both seem mature enough and provide decent performance to probably meet your needs. What I hear is that Redpanda is a lot easier to manage than Kafka.

What's the license for Redpanda? I couldn't find anything but maybe it's because I'm on mobile.

Disclaimer, I work at Redpanda.

Redpanda Community Edition is licensed with the Redpanda Business Source License (BSL). The core features are free and source-available.

This license was inspired by MariaDB and CockroachDB and "for 99.999% of users, restrictions will not apply". The big restriction is that users "cannot provide Redpanda as a commercial streaming or queuing service to others" which is primarily to deter large cloud vendors from taking our work and impacting our ability to operate as a business.

Here are some links for more details on how we came to this decision and how we license all our products and features.

https://redpanda.com/blog/bsl-source-available-license

https://docs.redpanda.com/docs/get-started/licenses/

I haven’t took the time but I should. Redpanda is written in C++ and I tend to prefer safer programming languages, redis being the exception.

Kafka (along with zookeeper) really isn't that bad to self-host.

Ime, it's easy if the org has a half decent infrastructure/configuration as code setup.