This has nothing to do with the software itself, but it bothers me: Why do you call a "high-throughput distributed messaging system" Kafka? Kafka's stories essentially describe the polar-opposite: crippled, ineffective, labyrinthine message systems that are exceedingly hierarchical in nature. They are also rather user-unfriendly, i.e. their users usually die horrible, lonely deaths. Am I just missing the in-joke here, and it's called Kafka because it is exactly the opposite of this, or did somebody overdo the hipster naming scheme?
That was my first thought. Based on the novels I've read, I would interpret it in a couple of possible ways:
- You receive a message, but the system can't tell you why your received it nor what you should do. (The Trial)
- It's not a distributed messaging system with bugs. Actually, you are the bug. (Metamorphosis)
As an aside, I went to a tech conference in Prague two months ago and visited Café Slavia, a hangout not just of Kafka, but also author Milan Kundera and president/poet Václav Havel. I had a glass of absinthe in their honour.
The rationale was that it should be a writer because we were building a distributed log or journal (a service dedicated to writing). The writer needed to be someone that (1) I liked, (2) sounded cool as a name, (3) was dead (because it would be creepy to use the name of someone who was alive).
At LinkedIn, they started code naming projects after authors and literary works. E.g., Kafka, Camus, and a bunch of Harry Potter references. Kafka was donated to Apache by LinkedIn and the name stuck.
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This has nothing to do with the software itself, but it bothers me: Why do you call a "high-throughput distributed messaging system" Kafka? Kafka's stories essentially describe the polar-opposite: crippled, ineffective, labyrinthine message systems that are exceedingly hierarchical in nature. They are also rather user-unfriendly, i.e. their users usually die horrible, lonely deaths. Am I just missing the in-joke here, and it's called Kafka because it is exactly the opposite of this, or did somebody overdo the hipster naming scheme?
That was my first thought. Based on the novels I've read, I would interpret it in a couple of possible ways:
- You receive a message, but the system can't tell you why your received it nor what you should do. (The Trial)
- It's not a distributed messaging system with bugs. Actually, you are the bug. (Metamorphosis)
As an aside, I went to a tech conference in Prague two months ago and visited Café Slavia, a hangout not just of Kafka, but also author Milan Kundera and president/poet Václav Havel. I had a glass of absinthe in their honour.
The rationale was that it should be a writer because we were building a distributed log or journal (a service dedicated to writing). The writer needed to be someone that (1) I liked, (2) sounded cool as a name, (3) was dead (because it would be creepy to use the name of someone who was alive).
At LinkedIn, they started code naming projects after authors and literary works. E.g., Kafka, Camus, and a bunch of Harry Potter references. Kafka was donated to Apache by LinkedIn and the name stuck.
It's written in Scala, so perhaps the reference is to the source code rather than the client interface ...
... or maybe you're just overthinking it.