What Running Kafka on VMs Taught Us About Systems Thinking
Summary
The Moniepoint article describes moving Kafka from VM-based deployments to Strimzi on Kubernetes, guided by a systems-thinking approach. By adopting a Kubernetes operator, GitOps (ArgoCD), and standardized YAML templates, the team eliminated SSH-based workflows, reduced manual maintenance, and gained unified observability and automated lifecycle management. The migration yielded lower operational toil, easier scaling, and clearer architecture decisions, with guidance on when Strimzi is a good fit and when a managed service might be preferable.