Redpanda Cloud - Annual Commits (BYOC & Dedicated/Serverless)

What do you like best about the product?

I really like Redpanda Streaming for its incredible customer support and impressive product quality. The cost of using Redpanda is another great feature, making it a compelling choice for my team. I also appreciate that it provides a managed BYOC Kafka solution, which is perfect for processing real-time and analytical data. Switching from Confluent to Redpanda was motivated by its cost-effectiveness and BYOC support, and the initial setup was very easy.

What do you dislike about the product?

Faster (and ideally proactive) reaction to cluster stability issues

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda Streaming processes large scale data quickly.

What do you like best about the product?

What stands out most about Redpanda is how it modernizes the Kafka ecosystem without the traditional overhead. Here’s how it delivers value across our key focus areas:

UI / UX: The Redpanda Console provides a clean, intuitive, and high-performance interface that makes topic management, message inspection, and consumer group monitoring effortless for both developers and SREs.

Integrations: Its API compatibility with Kafka is flawless. We were able to leverage our existing ecosystem of connectors and tools without changing of code, making the transition seamless.

Performance: Their architecture provide significantly lower latency and higher throughput compared to JVM-based solutions.

Pricing / ROI: We’ve seen a better ROI - both in terms of cloud infrastructure costs and reduced operational "toil".

Support / Onboarding: The onboarding process was straightforward, and the Redpanda team's support is highly proactive. They feel more like partners in our architecture than just a vendor.

AI / Intelligence: We are excited about Redpanda’s vision for Data Transforms and its ability to process data in-stream. This is crucial for our AI workflows, allowing us to pre-process and clean data at the edge before it hits our models.

What do you dislike about the product?

Overall, the platform is very stable and meets our expectations. However, if I were to point out areas for improvement:

Integrations (Kafka Connect): Our main concern at the moment is the upcoming end-of-life/deprecation of managed Kafka Connect support. For a team that relies on a streamlined, managed ecosystem, this transition introduces additional operational complexity, as we now have to rethink how we manage our connectors.

UI / UX: Console is great, more terraform (IaC) support would be a welcome addition.

Support / Onboarding: No complaints here.
Pricing / AI / Performance: In these areas, we haven't encountered any significant issues.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Redpanda solves several pain points that we previously faced with traditional streaming platforms:

Operational Complexity (UI/UX & Onboarding): Providing a built-in, high-quality Console, Redpanda has simplified our entire stack. This benefits us by significantly reducing the time spent on cluster management and troubleshooting, allowing our engineers to focus on building features rather than managing infrastructure.

Infrastructure Efficiency (Performance & Pricing/ROI): We’ve seen a reduction in cloud infrastructure costs and achieved much more consistent performance for our real-time data pipelines.

Ecosystem Fragmentation (Integrations): Redpanda solves the 'compatibility gap' by being fully Kafka-API compatible. This benefited us by allowing a seamless migration - we kept our existing integrations and tools while upgrading the underlying engine without any friction.

Future-Proofing (AI & Intelligence): We hope that It addresses the challenge of processing massive data streams for AI workflows. With its low-latency profile and upcoming in-stream transformation capabilities, it benefits us by providing a scalable foundation for our real-time AI and machine learning initiatives.

Business Continuity (Support): Having direct access to technical experts during onboarding and scaling has ensured that our streaming services remain highly available and reliable.

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate Redpanda Streaming for its ease of use in terms of setup and Kafka topic management, ACL management, and schema registry. The easy-to-define setup through the Redpanda web console is a big plus. I also like being able to access the APIs using the rpk tool, which provides a seamless CI/CD experience. The fast initial setup is complemented by the extensive and great documentation curated by the Redpanda team. I find the documents AI feature particularly useful as it makes it easy to search for information.

What do you dislike about the product?

Ability to set the broker node IP addresses as static from the get-go for the BYOC architecture. Ability to have basic features for networking and security such as CIDR ranges to pick and IP whitelisting.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Redpanda Streaming to allow our internal teams to publish and consume data easily. It provides customers real-time data access and centralizes data storage across the organization.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the Redpanda UI and how easy it is to navigate and search for topics/consumers

What do you dislike about the product?

I think the search is pretty difficult for the events in each topic. Looks like there's limit to how many events we can search from.
Also the reported metrics are a little different from other Kafka services which got me confused in the beginning; not sure if this is a bad thing tho

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're mostly using Redpanda for streaming services. I think we benefit from the performance and reasonable pricing for the services.

What do you like best about the product?

I find Redpanda Streaming easy to use with its user-friendly UI. I really appreciate its Kafka compatibility, which allows for seamless integration with Kafka tools and connections. This compatibility is a key feature for me as it enhances the functionality and connectivity of my backend systems.

What do you dislike about the product?

I don't like the price of bandwidth on BYOC when staying in the same zone. I'd prefer it to be free because it's free on GCP.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Redpanda Streaming to address ordering, scaling, and reliability issues in data streaming for our backend.