Seems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years.
When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction.
Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of features that Kafka doesn't have, like per-message acknowledgement, similar to RabbitMQ. And it has protocol support for RabbitMQ and Kafka, so can be a drop-in replacement.
Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.
I'm hoping this boosts Pulsar's status and helps get some traction for StreamNative. It seems like the best technical solution for events and messaging. It just needs a bit more market adoption to make an easier choice for enterprise, in my opinion. This might be that moment.
This and Materialize seemed like great tools. I met some of the team of Rising Wave at the Kafka conference last year in London and was impressed by their work. It may be great if you need such a tool.
In the end, I went with ClickHouse and it's materialized views feature. It might not be quite as powerful as what these other tools are doing, but it works for us, and it's really easy to set up. Before we were using Timescale's continuous aggregates, which had good performance, but require some domain knowledge to setup. ClickHouse materialized views are great because you don't need to be an expert to use them. And even so, performance is still very good.
My use-case is IoT devices sending data, and I'd want to keep the eg last 6 months of data for review, and some agregates, and archive + delete older data
I was going to go with Timescaledb for "simplicity" (eg having a single database)
I rented a BMW from Sixt in the USA earlier this year. I wanted to use the ConnectedDrive features, but it was blocked by BMW because the vehicle VIN was (correctly) registered as a Fleet Vehicle (i.e. a rental car) and thus none of those features were allowed with that car.
I have rented BMWs in the Netherlands and don't recall being able to use these features either.
Thus you seem to have encountered a situation which BMW and Sixt know about and have procedures in place to prevent, but their Italian subsidiary seems to have missed it with a certain batch of fleet vehicles, or just this specific one. I'd report it Sixt and move on.
I've rented beamers with Sixt at LAX and O'Hare, the latter just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't have any issues connecting to bluetooth so that I could use CarPlay. Could it be inconsistencies in how their BMW fleet is set up?
I ususally set up the bluetooth connection before driving off the lot, just so I can get staff assistance if it doesn't work - not being able to connect to the car is enough for me to insist on a new vehicle if they're unable to fix it.
Bluetooth and carplay do indeed work as you need to be connected to the vehicle. I used those features too. The ConnectedDrive feature discussed here is when you install the BMW app on your phone and register the VIN number of the car to your personal BMW account, verified by tapping some buttons in the vehicle while linking, and "owning" the car in your BMW app. This gives access to things like remote location tracking, starting the car from anywhere to get the airco etc working.
n.b. Doing this in a rental car probably violates some of the terms and conditions one would have to agree to when linking the car, like "I promise this is _my_ car and/or I have permission from the owner to link it to my personal BMW account"...
Amazon Q. Claude Code is great (the best imho, what everything else measures against right now), and Amazon Q seems almost as good and for the first week I've been using it I'm still on the free tier.
The flat pricing of Claude Code seems tempting, but it's probably still cheaper for me to go with usage pricing. I feel like loading my Anthropic account with the minimum of $5 each time would last me 2-3 days depending on usage. Some days it wouldn't last even a day.
I'll probably give Open AI's Codex a try soon, and also circle back to Aider after not using it for a few months.
I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.
> I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.
Cursor can find files on its own. But if you point it in the right direction it has far better results than Claude code.
It went through multiple stages of upgrades and I would say at this stage it is better than copilot. Fundamentally it is as good as cursor or windsurf but lacks some features and cannot match their speed of release. If you re on aws tho its a compelling offering.
I remember asking Amazon Q something and it wouldn’t reply cuz of security policy or something. It was as far as I can remember a legit question around Iam policy which I was trying to configure. I figured it out back in Google search.
I've been down this path, and if my experience is more common, then it really boils down to the classic "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM", and here IBM -> Confluent.
StreamNative seems like an excellent team, and I hope they succeed. But as another comment has written, something (puslar) being better (than kafka) has to either be adopted from the start, or be a big enough improvement to change— and as difficult and feature-poor that Kafka is, it still gets the job done.
I can rant longer about this topic but Pulsar _should_ be more popular, but unfortunately Confluent has dominated here and rent-seeking this field into the ground.
I'm biased because I recently introduced ClickHouse at my company, but everything I've seen so far makes me think analytical and observability use cases like this "just work" in ClickHouse.
Just like Postgres became the default choice for operational/relational workloads, I think ClickHouse is (or should) quickly become the standard for analytical workloads. In both cases, they both "just work". Postgres even has columnar storage extensions, but I still think ClickHouse is a better choice if you don't need transactions.
A rule of thumb I think devs should follow would be: use Postgres for operational cases, and ClickHouse for analytical ones. That should cover most scenarios well, at least until you encounter something unique enough to justify deeper research.
When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction.
Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of features that Kafka doesn't have, like per-message acknowledgement, similar to RabbitMQ. And it has protocol support for RabbitMQ and Kafka, so can be a drop-in replacement.
Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.
I'm hoping this boosts Pulsar's status and helps get some traction for StreamNative. It seems like the best technical solution for events and messaging. It just needs a bit more market adoption to make an easier choice for enterprise, in my opinion. This might be that moment.
https://streamnative.io/
*(yes I know about NATS)