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Redpanda

Redpanda is a modern, high-performance streaming data platform designed to be a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka. It offers full compatibility with Kafka’s APIs while delivering improved speed, simplicity, and efficiency. Built in C++ instead of Java, Redpanda is engineered to make better use of hardware and eliminate many of the operational complexities associated with running Kafka at scale.

At its core, Redpanda does the same thing Kafka does—it lets you publish, store, and consume streams of events in real time. It supports the same concepts: topics, producers, consumers, and partitions. However, Redpanda differs in that it doesn't rely on external components like ZooKeeper or KRaft for cluster coordination, making deployments much simpler and easier to manage.

One of Redpanda’s biggest strengths is performance. It’s optimized for low-latency, high-throughput workloads and can take full advantage of modern storage like NVMe drives and multi-core processors. This makes it especially well-suited for latency-sensitive applications such as financial services, telemetry pipelines, and real-time monitoring systems.

Because it maintains wire compatibility with Kafka, organizations can switch to Redpanda without changing their existing Kafka-based code or tools. Whether you’re building event-driven applications, streaming analytics, or data pipelines, Redpanda aims to offer a faster, more resource-efficient, and operationally simpler alternative to Kafka.

Production Deployment Configuration

For a resilient production deployment, Redpanda requires a minimum of three nodes to form a fault-tolerant cluster. This allows Redpanda to maintain quorum-based replication and continue serving data even if one node fails. Each node should be a well-provisioned machine capable of handling storage, CPU, and networking demands associated with event streaming workloads.

Minimum Infrastructure Recommendations

Nodes:

  • Minimum three nodes for high availability
  • Ideally, spread across different availability zones or failure domains if running in the cloud

CPU:

  • Modern multi-core processors (8+ vCPUs recommended)
  • Redpanda is CPU-intensive and benefits from high clock speed and dedicated cores

Memory:

  • At least 16 GB RAM per node for production
  • Larger memory pools help with caching and reduce disk I/O

Storage:

  • NVMe SSDs strongly recommended for low-latency writes and high throughput
  • At least 1 TB of disk space per node, depending on retention and workload

Network:

  • Low-latency, high-bandwidth network (10 Gbps+ is ideal)
  • Nodes must be able to communicate with each other over TCP for Raft replication

Additional Considerations

  • No ZooKeeper needed: Redpanda does not use ZooKeeper or KRaft, simplifying the architecture.
  • Data replication: Set the replication factor to at least 3 for production topics to ensure durability.
  • Monitoring & alerting: Use Redpanda Console or integrate with Prometheus/Grafana for observability.
  • Backup and disaster recovery: Consider object storage integration for tiered storage or backups using S3-compatible buckets.

By meeting these minimum requirements, Redpanda can provide a stable and highly available foundation for real-time event streaming, capable of recovering from node failures without data loss or service interruption.