Modern systems run on data in the form of fast, real-time, continuous streams.
But what happens when your system grows faster than your architecture can handle?
This is the story of Arjun, a backend engineer from Indore, and Meera, a DevOps engineer — and how Kafka rescued their collapsing system while teaching them how real-time streaming actually works.
It's a story, but it's also a complete walkthrough: why queues break, what Kafka replaces them with, the code, the bugs, and the cases where Kafka is genuinely the wrong choice.
Chapter 1: The Breaking Point
