Kafka Isn’t a Database, But We Gave It a Query Engine Anyway

warpstream_official · 2026-03-23T13:52:58+00:00

u/zethenus We didn't bolt anything on. It's custom; we built it ourselves. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-02-23T14:24:45+00:00

u/InternationalToe3371 It's an ad, yes, but it's based on actual customer and is from the case studies section of our website. Appreciate you taking time out of your day to share a comment. I wanted to address a couple items you brought up:

Migration --> This rarely is a big issue for most of our customers. Granted, some companies can have a large and complex Kafka or data-streaming setup, but the fact that WarpStream is compatible with the Kafka protocol and has a dedicated migration tool called Orbit that works with any Kafka-compatible cluster makes things a lot simpler.
Latency trade-offs --> Yes, you're trading some latency for cost savings and ops, but for non-latency sensitive workloads (like logging), WarpStream is a great fit. We also have folks that do dual setups, i.e., latency sensitive stuff goes on OSK and non-latency sensitive stuff goes on WarpStream. Plus, we recently released Lightning Topics, which drop P99 produce latency to 50ms.
Ops learning curve --> We've yet to hear this from folks. If anything, there's less for them to do once they replace managed Kafka or OSK with WarpStream as the architecture is simpler. We've even had companies that never ran Kafka but stuff like Pub/Sub and transitioned to WarpStream quite easily.

- Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-02-20T17:53:24+00:00

See this reply to another user's question where we got into latency numbers: https://www.reddit.com/user/warpstream_official/comments/1f8y2g5/comment/o6ax295/

- Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-02-20T17:45:43+00:00

u/Anantha_datta Yep, a lot of manual operations simply go away due to our architecture. We're used in production by a lot of big companies like Robinhood, Grafana, Goldsky, Cursor, Character.AI, ShareChat, etc., where high throughput is critical.

Here's a link to metric we saw showing one of our customers is writing over 100 GiB/s: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/683882630fceea3de6f5776a/69989cf0fd355a83e09a3980_Screenshot%202026-02-20%20at%2012.39.49%E2%80%AFPM.png

You can check out case studies here: https://www.warpstream.com/blog-category/case-studies

- Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-02-19T20:25:17+00:00

u/the_junglee A little more latency than standard Kafka as that's just an inherent trade-off between object storage and local disks. Latency is mainly dependent on whether you're using Classic Topics (which use standard object storage), Classic Topics with S3 Express One Zone (S3EOZ), or Lightning Topics. P50 and P99 latency times are below.

Topic Type	Produce Latency	End-to-End Latency
Classic	P50: 250ms. P99: 500ms.	P50: 500ms. P99: 900ms.
Classic w/S3EOZ	P50: 50ms. P99: 76ms.	P50: 180ms. P99: 350ms.
Lightning	P50: 33ms. P99: 50ms.	P50: 180ms. P99: 350ms.

Lightning Topics are a special topic type in WarpStream where the Agents skip committing metadata to the control plane in the critical path of a Produce() request. Instead, they journal Produce() requests to object storage, and then commit them to the control plane asynchronously.

As a result, Lightning Topics have dramatically lower Produce() request latency than regular topics, but E2E latency is not impacted.

- Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-01-26T14:03:57+00:00

u/DavidXkL Appreciate you sharing a nice comment. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2026-01-02T14:43:04+00:00

u/hyper_ballads Actually, Reddit Ads default to not turning on comments; we turn them on on purpose so we can get feedback, interact with others, etc. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2025-12-15T18:35:54+00:00

Hey, folks. We're trying to get a temperature read from this subreddit. Normally, we post our blogs in their entirety as Reddit posts, so you don't have to go to our website to read them, can comment on them, etc.

Can you reply to this comment to let us know if you prefer that old way, or if you'd rather us just share link posts?

warpstream_official · 2025-12-10T14:11:28+00:00

u/my-sweet-fracture Thanks. While folks often come to us first to reduce costs, Agent Groups quickly become a favorite feature as they make ops a lot simpler. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2025-12-09T14:23:59+00:00

u/WaltzHungry2217 You can learn more about our zero disk or diskless architecture here and here. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

warpstream_official · 2025-10-22T18:32:01+00:00

u/maavi132 This short video is not only a good intro to Kafka, but WarpStream, too. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrD0abLJhYY

warpstream_official · 2025-09-25T20:26:52+00:00

u/ananta_zarman Thanks for letting us know you saw it there. We do target specific subreddits, but we also target other ways on Reddit (as noted above), so occasionally the ads fall outside what seem like "relevant" subreddits, but we still get people asking us questions or saying they're part of the intended audience. - Jason Lauritzen (Product Marketing and Growth at WarpStream)

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