Lessons from the Kitchen Back in the mid-90s, I worked in a busy hotel kitchen. Orders flew in from the restaurant, and Freddie(the head chef) had a smart system: whoever was free grabbed the next dish. Simple, efficient, and no one drowned in pasta. Now imagine if they’d done it the ‘organized’ way: Chef A…

Context Starting with Apache Kafka 2.4, the default partitioning strategy for messages without a key changed from round-robin to sticky partitioning. This change was introduced to improve batching efficiency and throughput, but it can have unintended consequences for certain workloads—especially batch job orchestration. Partitioning Strategies in Kafka Strategy Description Key-Based Messages with the same key go to the same partition (preserves order)….