.NET Aspire shows great promise in simplifying the development of distributed systems using .NET for cloud-native applications. However, the absence of support for Kafka (or even similar technologies such as Azure Event Hubs) poses a significant limitation to its broader adoption in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Kafka is central to a lot of modern architecture. It's used by >80% of the Fortune 100, and unlike other systems where there are a lot of vendor-specific alternatives, it's overwhelmingly the most popular option when you're trying to build an event-driven backbone with data in motion at scale.

I recognize the challenges involved in integrating Kafka support, including the absence of a first-party managed Kafka service on Azure and lack of a comprehensive first-party Kafka.NET client. Despite these hurdles, I believe that supporting Kafka could greatly enhance .NET Aspire's relevance in contemporary cloud-native architectures.