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Did you click the link thinking its kafka software? I should get some sleep.
Apache Kafka never even crossed my mind until I read your comment. Franz Kafka on the other hand is one of those authors everyone should read and know about. Extraordinary mind.
Never cross my mind to. I associated with Franz Kafka and his book The Trial .
considering this is hackernews, I was thinking about Apache kafka as well. But then I saw "theguardian" and thought, why would they publish a kafka benchmark.
TIL that Kafka was first a real person before a widely used software.
For non-solid state drive like HDD, sequencing writes could theoretically maximize the writing performance, while Franz Kafka famous for writing. That's how Apache Kafka gets its name. Apache Cassandra writing optimization is similar, but not having a writer name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka

"Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work."

Kafka's writings do have some very peculiar themes, though.

I don't know about other countries, but in France calling a process or an organization "Kafkaïan" is a big pejorative. It evokes incapacitating, mind-numbing complexity that you are thrust into.

I thought the name came from LinkedIn's woes of being unable to dispatch data efficiently between the several services and databases. That it was sort of a Kafkaïan mess; and that Kafka -the write-optmized log service- helped decouple this mess; with n writers and m readers you went from m*n to m+n dependencies. Kafka, the tool you need for Kafkaïan problems?

If Kreps named it because of the write optimized facet, other authors could be more suited. Like Asimov, Dumas or Voltaire [1]?

In the end if that's all good though. Franz Kafka is a great author. That's a good name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers