Why Your Kafka Pipeline Looks Fine in Staging but Breaks in Production
I have deployed Kafka pipelines that ran cleanly in staging for two weeks. No lag. No errors. Offset commits landing perfectly. Then I pushed to production, and within forty-eight hours, something broke in a way that every staging run had given me no reason to anticipate. This is not a story about a one-off mistake. It is a pattern I have seen repeat across teams and industries, because the properties that make Kafka genuinely powerful in production are […]