We're not talking about no disks as in no storage, just nothing other than object storage. This does have a latency trade-off, but with the advent of S3 Express One Zone and Azure's equivalent high-performance tier (with GCP surely not far behind), a system designed purely around object storage can now trade cost for latency where it makes sense. WarpStream already has support for writing to a quorum of S3 Express One Zone buckets to provide regional availability, so there's not an availability trade-off here either.
There are no silver bullets. Traditional S3, with the durability guarantees that S3 provides, has a latency trade-off because the data needs to be copied to additional availability zones before acknowledging the write. Once you collapse everything to a single availability zone (i.e. S3 Express One Zone), you have little reason not to use Kafka, which scales costs within a single AZ without a problem. At $0.16/GB, S3EOZ is about 7x more expensive than normal S3 ($0.023/GB) for fewer copies of the data/lower integrity guarantees, or about 60% more expensive than MSK or Kinesis Data Streams ($0.10/GB). If you write to a quorum of S3EOZ, then you're tripling your S3EOZ storage costs, to 0.16 * 3 = $0.48/GB. And this doesn't include the cost of compute!
Where's the value above just running Kafka within a single AZ, with no latency trade-off?
You don't have to keep the data stored in S3 express one zone forever, you can just land it there and then immediately compact it to S3 standard. You still pay the higher fee to write to S3EOZ, but not the higher storage fee.
WarpStream does this, data gets compacted out within seconds usually. Of course this is now... tiered storage. But implemented over two "infinitely scalable" remote storage systems so it gets rid of all the operational and scaling problems you have with a typical tiered storage Kafka setup that uses local volumes as the landing zone.
Do these operational and scaling problems include AWS's managed services? MSK, Kinesis Data Streams?
At small scale, why wouldn't someone go with one of those? And at large scale, where's the Total Cost of Ownership comparison to show that it's worth it to ditch Kafka's local disks for a model built on object storage?
RE:numbers: https://www.warpstream.com/blog/warpstream-benchmarks-and-tc...
RE: comparing to a single-zone Kafka cluster. A lot of people really dislike operating Kafka. Some people don't mind it and that's cool too, but its not the majority in my experience.
…rebranded with a different name, again.
Again complex, again no obvious way to query storage directly, again unclear performance characteristics, again no obvious reason to see why the networking costs make saving from it largely meaningless.
You have to admit it’s a bit of a hard sell without any comeback after literally just saying that people were just inventing new names for minor variations on tiered storage…
We've designed WarpStream to work extremely well on the slower, harder-to-use one first, and that is how 95+% of our workloads run in production. The tiered storage solutions from other streaming vendors do the opposite, where they were first designed for local SSDs and then bolted on object storage later.
The equivalent would be if we were pitching our support for an even slower, cheaper tier of object storage like AWS S3 Glacier.
Considering a c5.4xlarge instance with 16 cores and 32GB of memory, which offers a baseline bandwidth of only 5Gib, it's limited to a maximum production throughput of 100MiB/s.
Therefore, I have reservations about the cost-effectiveness of your low-latency solution, given these potential expenses.
That's still a trade-off. Object storage, simply by the overhead of HTTP + SSL, has higher latency than EFS, which has higher latency than EBS, which has higher latency than local SSD. So in the end your service (no matter if it's Kafka or anything else) has _higher_ latency if you also want consistency (aka resilience against "everything goes dark in an instant") as all writes on all machines in the pool have to be committed to storage.
The only way a "zero disk" anything makes sense is if you have enough machines in enough diverse locations with enough RAM to cover the entire workload and to pray there's never any event taking the entire cloud provider offline.