Hi all, The Kafka community is currently seeing an unprecedented situation with three KIPs (KIP-1150, IP-1176, KIP-1183) simultaneously addressing the same challenge of high replication costs when running Kafka across multiple cloud availability zones. Each KIP offers a different solution to this issue. While diversity of innovative ideas is a key strength of open-source projects, it creates a burden for reviewers and users who must compare and comment on multiple proposals simultaneously. Furthermore, discussion around the three KIPs has stalled for over two months now. This could be due to the authors being hesitant to proceed due to the existence of alternative, potentially conflicting, solutions. Addressing replication cost is a key concern of Kafka’s userbase and we should try to move the conversation forward if we can.
>From what I understand, these three KIPs are not mutually exclusive. But adopting all three KIPs in the community might not be what we expect. Thus, I would like to *start a discussion on how we could move the conversation forward*. To save time for the KIP readers/reviewers, I have created this document <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/The+Path+Forward+for+Saving+Cross-AZ+Replication+Costs+KIPs>[1] to help summarize each of the KIPs and describe their current status. *Hope to get some suggestions/feedback from the community*. [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/The+Path+Forward+for+Saving+Cross-AZ+Replication+Costs+KIPs KIP-1150: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1150%3A+Diskless+Topics KIP-1176: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1176%3A+Tiered+Storage+for+Active+Log+Segment KIP-1183: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1183%3A+Unified+Shared+Storage Thank you. Luke
