Redpanda Consulting & Services for Enterprises

Our Redpanda consulting covers cluster architecture and sizing, thread-per-core performance tuning, tiered storage design, WASM transform pipeline development, and migration from Apache Kafka. Every engagement is staffed by a named senior engineer with production streaming platform experience.

For most teams, yes — there's no separate ZooKeeper or KRaft controller quorum to run, and the single-binary deployment removes a lot of JVM tuning surface area. It's not zero-ops: you still need to size nodes, tune for the thread-per-core architecture, and monitor cluster health. We're direct about where the complexity actually goes, not where it disappears.

Most standard producer/consumer client code works unchanged thanks to Redpanda's Kafka-API compatibility. Where you need real testing is Kafka-specific tooling — certain MirrorMaker configurations, some Kafka Streams state-store behaviors, and third-party connectors that assume Kafka-specific broker behavior. We test compatibility against your actual client inventory rather than assuming full parity.

WASM transforms let you run lightweight stream processing logic directly inside the Redpanda broker, without standing up a separate Kafka Streams or Flink cluster for simple filtering, enrichment, or reshaping tasks. We design transform pipelines for use cases where the processing logic is simple enough not to justify separate compute infrastructure.

Tiered storage moves older segment data from local NVMe to object storage (S3-compatible) while keeping it queryable, which lets you retain data far longer than local disk would allow without the cost of keeping it all on fast local storage. We design retention tiers based on your actual query and replay patterns, not a blanket policy.

We start with under-replicated partition counts and consumer lag metrics to isolate the problem layer, then move to immediate stabilization and root cause analysis. We stay engaged until the cluster is fully recovered — not just until the dashboard looks green.