What Running Kafka on VMs Taught Us About Systems Thinking

Celestina Amadi leads the Cloud Engineering team behind the infrastructure that powers Moniepoint's payment and savings products, building systems that move transaction and savings data reliably for millions of customers every day. She's also a Grafana Champion, a HashiCorp Ambassador, and an IBM Champion 2026.

The article below takes us on a journey of how her team switched from running Kafka on VMs to Strimzi. The coolest part about this switch is that the VMs were working, yet she made the call to rebuild anyway because she could see where things were headed before they became a problem.

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Why We Moved to Strimzi

We moved to Strimzi because we looked honestly at how we were running Kafka and made a deliberate call: this does not scale, and we can do better.

What Running Kafka on VMs Taught Us About Systems Thinking

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