WarpStream Blog

WarpStream BYOC reimplements the Kafka protocol with a stateless, zero-disk cloud-native architecture, replacing Kafka brokers with WarpStream Agents to simplify operations. But data streaming extends beyond Kafka clusters alone.

In this post, I’ll start off with a brief overview of “shared nothing” vs. “shared storage” architectures in general. This discussion will be a bit abstract and high-level, but the goal is to share with you some of the guiding philosophy that ultimately led to WarpStream’s architecture.

Orbit is a tool which creates identical, inexpensive, scaleable, and secure continuous replicas of Kafka clusters. It is built into WarpStream and works without any user intervention to create WarpStream replicas of any Apache Kafka-compatible source cluster.

WarpStream now supports AWS Glue Schema Registries, in addition to the Kafka-compatible schema registries. The WarpStream Agent can use schemas stored in the user’s AWS Glue Schema Registries to validate records.

Backpressure is a really simple concept. When the system is nearing overload, it should start “saying no” by slowing down or rejecting requests. Of course, the big question is: How do we know when we should reject a request?

WarpStream now has the capability to connect to external schema registries, and verify that records actually conform to the provided schema.

Traditional offset-based monitoring can be misleading due to varying message sizes and consumption rates. To address this, you can introduce a time-based metric for a more accurate assessment of consumer group lag.

How we built support for running WarpStream's control plane and Metadata Store in multiple regions, while still presenting our platform as a single pane of glass.