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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

This is basically it. I'm always amazed at how much reimplementation of TCP we see at a high level in distributed systems. Backpressure, message ordering, retries, etc. all work pretty well in TCP.

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Yes the idempotence part of this feature set is very similar to TCP (the transactional consumption and updates obviously aren't). But this isn't a reimplementation at all. TCP provides deduplication within the context of a connection tied to a process. If that connection is lost or the process dies then duplicates may occur. The feature in Kafka is much stronger as the "connection" is persistent and replicated with the log so effectively the "connection" fails over if the server dies.

Probably these new over-layers of abstractions are needed for some use-cases in for specialized and more performant networks. Otherwise, the simple fact of using TCP would be enough.

But indeed, it is interesting to see the computing cycle reimplementations spinning over and over again.

Re: TCP, it only maintains sequencing guarantees over the lifetime of a single connection. Obviously this is too weak of a guarantee for Kafka as leaders can change in a cluster. We've built idempotence in a way that makes the sequence number and producer ID part of the Kafka log. So it can provide idempotence even if brokers fail and new connections are established between the producer and broker

Yeah, my point wasn't "TCP does this, that's all we need". It was just an observation about how we apply principles at a higher level.

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