Hi HN — I built Ayder because Kafka in 2025 feels like starting a car with a hand crank.

# That's it. You're streaming. curl -X POST localhost:1109/broker/topics/orders/produce -d '{"item":"widget"}'

Single binary. Zero dependencies. HTTP-native (not a proxy). Built in C with libuv.

Performance (wrk2, real network, 3-node Raft, sync-majority writes):

  Throughput:     50K msg/s sustained
  P99:            3.46ms
  P99.9:          12.94ms
  Server P99.999: 1.22ms (HTTP isn't the bottleneck)

Recovery time — the number nobody talks about:

  Kafka after unclean shutdown: 2+ hours (real production reports)
  Ayder after SIGKILL: 40-50 seconds with 8 million offsets

Tested repeatedly. Zero data loss. Follower replays AOF, asks leader for missing offsets, catches up automatically. No manual intervention.

What you get: - Append-only log with consumer groups + committed offsets - Raft consensus (3/5/7 nodes) with mTLS - KV store with CAS + TTL - Stream processing: filter, group_by, windowed joins (including cross-format Avro+Proto) - Idempotent produce, retention policies, Prometheus metrics

I'm a solo founder from Kazakhstan, self-taught systems programmer. Spent 8 months building this. Looking for feedback on the API, what's missing, and early design partners.

GitHub: https://github.com/A1darbek/ayder