Not sure I understand the "large" comment. Painful to configure.. have you looked at CP-Ansible: https://github.com/confluentinc/cp-ansible

High Latency: Kafka's latency depends on your configuration and infrastructure. It has some of the lowest latency out there when configured correctly.

Curios to know why you find it difficult to look after? It's super stable, and is pretty easy to monitor via JMX.

Curious to hear more details about your thoughts on this. I've done some pretty significant improvements around my team's use of it in the last few months and can't say I've had this experience. The difficulties with it really, to me, seem to be a case of batteries-not-included, speaking as someone who had never run it prior to last August.

> difficult to look after.

Agree with this 100%. But what about hosted kafka solutions?

> high latency

Not sure I understand this point.