Hear, hear. A few years ago I worked for an esteemed client whose director said «I want Kafka» for [mostly] synchronous interaction patterns. I said «no», the director said «I want Kafka». That repeated a few more times, and I had to begrudgingly comply since the client was paying for it.
The architecture for the solution drew the inspiration pretty heavily from the TCP protocol design, with incoming events yielding either an ACK or a NACK events also dispatched asynchronously. The key was the stringent adherence to supplying the original event ID in the Reply-To event envelope (hello, SMTP) and having a separate process correlating the inbound and outbound ACK/NACK events. It has wrought success in times bygone (and does persist unto this present day), yet I must, with all due deference, decline to partake therein henceforth.
The architecture for the solution drew the inspiration pretty heavily from the TCP protocol design, with incoming events yielding either an ACK or a NACK events also dispatched asynchronously. The key was the stringent adherence to supplying the original event ID in the Reply-To event envelope (hello, SMTP) and having a separate process correlating the inbound and outbound ACK/NACK events. It has wrought success in times bygone (and does persist unto this present day), yet I must, with all due deference, decline to partake therein henceforth.