WarpStream Blog

Character.AI operates at scale, supporting over 20 million monthly active users across our services. Despite being a relatively small company, Character.AI services have significant and complex data storage needs.

Chances are you probably had a strong reaction to the title of this post. In our experience, Kafka is one of the most polarizing technologies in the data space. Some people hate it, some people swear by it, but almost every technology company uses it.

Many of today's most highly adopted open source “big data” infrastructure projects – like Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, etc. – follow a common story. A large company, startup or otherwise, faces a unique, high scale infrastructure challenge that's poorly supported by existing tools. They create an internal solution for their specific needs, and then later (kindly) open source it for the greater community to use. Now, even smaller startups can benefit from the work and expertise of these seasoned engineering teams. Great, right?

Tiered storage is a hot topic in the world of data streaming systems, and for good reason. Cloud disks are (really) expensive, object storage is cheap, and in most cases, live consumers are just reading the most recently written data. Paying for expensive cloud disks to store historical data isn’t cost-effective, so historical data should be moved (tiered) to object storage. On paper, it makes all the sense in the world.

WarpStream is joining Confluent to bring data streaming to customer's cloud accounts with WarpStream BYOC.

Follow up to "Tiered Storage Won't Fix Kafka", this post covers all the different advantages that WarpStream's Zero Disk / Diskless Architecture provides over Apache Kafka.