Are data streaming platforms ready for a mission critical world?

Commodity-of-the-shelf (COTS) data streaming platforms, e.g., Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, have been powering companies from several sectors to move and extract further insights from their data. Yet, little is known about the suitability of these platforms for mission critical applications such as disaster recovery, first-aid response and military coordination. This paper provides a provocative discussion on how prepared current data streaming platforms are for mission critical scenarios. We argue that, despite their intrinsic reliability and security features, these platforms are still hard to test/operate which ultimately hinders trust on their safety and security conditions. Moreover, they commonly assume a powerful underlying infrastructure, which makes it tough to keep a high performance in resource-constrained environments (e.g., satellite networks). We conclude by identifying relevant research directions to ameliorate the performance and suitability of data streaming platforms for mission-critical applications.