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.

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!

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