Founder's Letter: Responsive and the Future of Stream Processing
A lot has happened in the world of stream processing in the year and a half since we started Responsive. We shipped three truly innovative products, landed our first customers, and landed our first expansions too - no small feat for a team of four in under 18 months! But, even so, I think this understates the progress we’ve made. Let me explain why.
When we started Responsive back in April 2023, the stream processing world seemed destined to become a world of ‘better data processing’ as opposed to a world of fundamentally new types of applications, a distinction I wrote about in this thread. Back then, streaming SQL was all the rage, with every major player in the space and half a dozen startups building streaming SQL offerings. SQL is a great language for expressing ETL and analytics logic, but it has never been a language developers pick for expressing application logic.
By contrast, Responsive was founded on the belief that the true value of stream processing is in the new applications you can build with event streams. For example, applications like real-time spend limits are only possible at scale as event driven applications. And while Kafka Streams’ embedded form factor made it the leading choice for developers building mission-critical event driven apps, there was too much friction in operating Kafka Streams, which we strongly believed was holding the ecosystem back.
