When it comes time to choose a distributed messaging system, everyone knows the answer: Apache Kafka. But how about when you’re on the hook to choose a world-class, horizontally scalable stream data processing system? When you need not just publish and subscribe messaging, but also long-term storage, a flexible integration framework, and a means of deploying real-time stream processing applications at scale without having to integrate a number of different pieces of infrastructure yourself? The answer is still Apache Kafka.