Kafka on Kubernetes: Performance Lessons for Any Disk-Heavy Data Service

We recently started migrating Kafka clusters from EC2 to EKS using Strimzi. The goal was not to chase new features, but to reduce the operational overhead of running large stateful clusters by hand. Upgrades, configuration changes, instance-family replacements, and failure recovery all required too much manual coordination on EC2. We wanted a model that gave us: Declarative configuration. Simpler upgrades. Easier infrastructure changes. Better self-healing. Less day-to-day operational toil. That