I wonder if Redpanda thinks about or offers some alternative protocol that would be better defined in terms of transaction guarantees. At this point it looks like Kafka’s protocol was a nice try but it needs a major refactoring.
Documentation is a bit confusing: the protocol was evolved over time (new KIPs) and there is mismatch between the database model and kafka model. But we see a lot of potential in the Kafka transactional protocol.
At Redpanda we were able to push to 5k distributed transactions cross replicated shard. It's a mind-blowing for a database to achieve the same result.
