I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.

This. Using RP was like a breath of fresh air compared to the dread of Kafka (both local dev, and running a prod cluster)

Same, small martech company. RedPanda works and the pricing allows actually using the service, plus the “source available” isn’t that limiting if you prefer to run your own stuff. Definitely glad to be off kafka prior to this news!

Last i talked to RedPanda sales while working at a big name client they would not offer us anything below $100k per year for enterprise support etc (us running on our kubernetes). Looks like they added some "serverless" pricing thing now, but at the time Azure Eventhub (kakfa client compatible) was cheapest enterprisy option if I remember correctly.

Hmm. Strange. DM me details. Haven’t heard of anything like that.

We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.

I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.

Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...

Snowflake did not acquire RP after all.

Oh wow, my bad. Thanks for setting the record straight.