[moulick]

Confluent had great stuff but their prices were crazy. When we got a quote from them, it was 20x more than what we could run on our own. We got quoted something like ~500k/year and my math on running it on AWS came around 25k for the same sized cluster via Strimzi operator on dedicated K8s nodes. We could hire a dedicated 3 person team to manage the cluster for the same price lol.

Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.

[lz400]

I have similar stories, I showed the Confluent consultants a projection of their Kafka quote vs Kinesis and it was like 10x, even they were confused. The ingress/egress costs are insane. I think they just do very deep discounts to certain customers. The product is good but if you pay full ticket it probably doesn't make sense.