> 1. Do you really need a queue?

I'm a java dev and maybe my projects are about big integrations, but I've always needed queue like constructs and polling from a db was almost always a headache, especially with multiple consumers and publishers.

Sure it can be done, and in many projects we do have cron-jobs on different pods -- not a global k8s cron-job, but legacy cron jobs and it works fine.

Kafka does not YET support real queue (but I'm sure there's a high profile KIP to have true queue like behavior, per consumer group, with individual commits), and does not support server side filtering.

But consumer groups and partitions have been such a blessing for me, it's very hard to overstate how useful they are with managing stateful apps.