tco

The Apache Kafka community introduced KIP-500 to remove ZooKeeper and replace it with KRaft, a built-in consensus layer that simplifies operations, improves scalability, and reduces complexity. Kafka itself supports smooth, zero downtime migrations from ZooKeeper to KRaft, even for large, mission critical clusters. But Amazon MSK does not. Instead, MSK forces users to perform a disruptive full migration to a new cluster. This article explores the challenges of MSK’s approach, highlights the risks for client applications, and outlines key evaluation criteria and recommendations for choosing the right data streaming platform in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.