Would Arroyo be an alternative to Confluent KSQL?
KSQL is pretty simple and easy to run if you already have Kafka, but will be much more expensive and harder to scale due to its reliance on Kafka streams for persistence and shuffling of data in processing DAG.
And with Confluent's embrace of Flink in the past year (https://www.confluent.io/blog/cloud-kafka-meets-cloud-flink-...) it's not clear that KSQL has much of a future.