Comment by enether
7 months ago
In what way is it materially easier to maintain and less finicky? I read a lot about this but I haven’t seen a concise bullet point list of why, which leads me to naturally distrust such claims. Ditto for the resources - Kafka is usually bottlenecked on disk/network, and whether it’s c++ or not doesn’t solve that
I've been using Redpanda for a few years now and here's what I've noticed.
Its a compiled binary - no JVM to manage. Java apps have always been a headache for me. Plus, no zookeeper - one less thing to break.
The biggest benefit I've seen is the performance. Redpanda just outperforms Apache Kakfa on similar hardware. Its also Kafka compliant in every way I've noticed, so all my favorite tools that interact with Kafka work the same with Redpanda.
Redpanda, like Kafka, writes to disk, so you'll always be limited by your hardware no matter what you use (but NVMe's are fast and affordable).
YMMV, but its been a good experience for me.