That observation is correct. Currently, people misuse stream processing systems like Storm and Samza for data import/export. This is an overkill. Kafka Connect is focused on providing scalable and operational connectors to various systems using Kafka as the underlying transport mechanism.

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We have built a fairly robust system along the idea of Kafka Connect and it's open sourced at https://github.com/flipkart/aesop. Currently, it supports MySQL & Hbase as sources and MySQL, Hbase, ES, Kafka as destination.

Haha, funny you mention Onyx! We pipe data from kafka into storm :) Great combo!