Kafka Has Become the Postgres of Streaming — And That Changes Everything

Kafka has crossed the commodity threshold — reliable, ubiquitous, and no longer a strategic differentiator. Like Postgres before it, Kafka's success is also its ceiling for vendors trying to build businesses on it. The hard problems have moved up the stack: lakehouse integration, cost efficiency, governance, and real-time context for AI. Commoditization isn't failure. It's the foundation everything else gets built on.