Kafka Msg VS REST Calls

Question

Nowadays in microservice world, i’m seeing alot of design in my workplace that uses kafka messaging when you can achieve similar results using rest api calls between microservic

Answer 1

Main benefit with kafka:

With direct REST calls to each service - if you have N services that all need to talk to each other, that's around N^2/2 connections. You might also need to build some load balancer in front of some services that get lots of requests and maybe a queuing/buffering system within the service to queue up its requests (lol)

With kafka, you just need N topics. It already provides its queuing system, by definition.

Main drawback with kafka:

The services aren't waiting for request response. It's harder to associate a response with the request once a response does show up in a topic.