The Log: What Every Software Engineer Should Know conceptpaper
Kreps (LinkedIn), 2013.
Kreps (LinkedIn), 2013. Long-form essay (nominally a blog post; treated as a paper in the canon) arguing that the append-only log is the unifying abstraction underneath databases, message queues, distributed systems, and stream processing. Lays the conceptual foundation for Kafka and the entire 'log as central nervous system of the data infrastructure' design pattern. Reading order: read this before reading anything Kafka-specific; it explains *why* Kafka is shaped the way it is.