Replacing Kafka with… SQLite?

BÆRSkin Tactical Supply Co., a company known for durable outdoor gear, transitioned from using Kafka to SQLite for event ingestion, driven by the need to reduce complexity and address event loss issues. The company replaced Kafka's setup with a novel architecture where each Kafka partition is represented by a separate SQLite database, powered by Turso Cloud, allowing for infinite scalability and significant cost savings. This change resulted in a 60% reduction in infrastructure costs and eliminated event loss, leveraging the team's existing familiarity with relational databases. This approach challenges the conventional reliance on streaming platforms like Kafka, suggesting that SQLite-based solutions can offer efficient, scalable, and cost-effective alternatives for teams with a solid understanding of relational databases and moderate scale requirements.