🚀 Real-time Data Streaming with Apache Kafka on Azure: 3 Deployment Approaches ☁️🐘📊 Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on designing and implementing an infrastructure to handle real-time data streaming using Apache Kafka in the cloud. The goal: build a scalable, observable, and maintainable platform. 💡 Here's what we explored: 🔹 1. VM-based Kafka Cluster (Traditional Infra) Kafka and Zookeeper were deployed on Azure VMs, configured via Ansible over SSH. Monitoring was still done via Prometheus + Grafana, with full control over the VMs and the OS layer. 🔹 2. AKS + Deployment via