What Running Kafka on VMs Taught Us About Systems Thinking

Moniepoint’s Cloud Engineering team replaced their ad-hoc Kafka deployments on VMs with Strimzi, a Kubernetes operator that automates Kafka provisioning, scaling, and upgrades. The prior setup required manual SSH port-forwarding, per-instance Docker-Compose restarts, inconsistent versions, and fragmented monitoring, consuming engineering time that Strimzi’s declarative configuration eliminated.