Distributed pub-sub not pulling its weight

[lewisjkl]

From all that I can tell, we are not utilizing the distributed pub-sub (from akka-clustering) for very much. My assessment leads me to believe that the only spot where we are currently using it is when a topic is created. If this is the case then it really is not saving us anything. Topic creation is few-and-far-between. The main application flow doesn't even take advantage of this functionality (and I don't really think it should either). I think we should get rid of the distributed pub-sub. This would also allow us to remove akka-clustering and dependence from Consul.

Before doing this, we need to validate that my theory is true:

• The only time that the pub-sub is used is on topic creation.

If it is used elsewhere then we should discuss about whether or not those other cases are needed.

It is worth noting that the akka-management dependency is currently blocking us by not being on the latest version of jackson-fasterxml. This is a dependency that confluent is using for several of their libraries and they are on a newer version of it. This is what originally got me going down this path, but I think in any case it would be good to reduce the complexity here.