How Nanit drives engineering efficiency and innovation with Redpanda

Challenge

RabbitMQ’s limitations stall innovation and collaboration

Nanit empowers parents to navigate parenthood with the first personalized, AI-powered, one-app solution for parenting. Through sleep analytics, real-time video, personalized milestones, and smart notifications, Nanit transforms raw data into meaningful, actionable insights, giving parents peace of mind.

However, as the company grew, its backend infrastructure faced increased demands, especially for handling real-time event data. Nanit used RabbitMQ to support its microservices, but RabbitMQ's limitation as a message broker—not an event store—meant it couldn't replay historical data, hindering analytics, debugging, and feature development. And, with ever-increasing event volumes, RabbitMQ struggled with high throughput, which led to queue bottlenecks, dropped messages, and reliability issues.

“To create a new feature, we needed data from multiple sources,” said Senior Backend Developer, Eddie Mishelevich. “Some features just weren’t worth the effort to implement, so we had to move on.”

To continue innovating, Nanit needed a scalable event streaming platform with persistent, replayable data that was easily accessible across teams to free up its engineers from manual coordination and troubleshooting.

Why Redpanda

A fully managed, high-performance streaming engine

Nanit evaluated three options: self-managing their clusters, using Amazon MSK, or adopting a fully managed event streaming solution. Ultimately, Nanit chose Redpanda Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a fully managed Kafka-compatible solution that offered scalability, performance, and reliability without any operational burden.

Redpanda offered several benefits that other platforms lacked:

• Guaranteed data safety with zero loss. Redpanda’s architecture guarantees persistent, fault-tolerant event logs and data integrity across its real-time event pipeline.
• A hassle-free, fully managed solution. Nanit offloads maintenance, upgrades, and infrastructure issues to Redpanda, freeing engineers to focus on product development.
• Seamless developer collaboration. Redpanda enables teams across Nanit to easily access, consume, and share event data without manual coordination or custom API workarounds.
• Simplified infrastructure management. Redpanda’s proactive monitoring identifies issues early—often before Nanit’s internal monitoring tools detect them.
• Effortless scalability. Redpanda allows Nanit to seamlessly increase event streaming capacity as their platform grows, without downtime, operational complexity, or high costs.
• Tiered storage. Nanit offloads older event data into cost-effective object storage. They can still retain large and instantly accessible volumes of data without expensive storage costs.

In Redpanda, Nanit found a true extension of its team. “Redpanda’s team is incredibly responsive, professional, and proactive," Eddie said. "They alert us about issues in our cluster or that we’re running out of resources, and they’ll often mitigate it without asking.”

Results

Faster development, greater reliability and scalability

Since migrating to Redpanda Cloud on AWS, Nanit has modernized its data architecture from a basic queue-based system to a sophisticated event sourcing platform. This powerful shift has allowed teams to think about data as persistent, reusable streams rather than ephemeral messages, fundamentally changing how they design features and systems. 

Today, Nanit's architecture is more resistant and flexible than ever, enabling teams to build more intelligent features powered by real-time insights. And, for the first time, engineers can easily access and share event data without complex integrations or manual coordination. 

“With Redpanda, we don’t have to be Kafka experts,” Eddie says. We don’t have to worry about infrastructure or performance bottlenecks. We can just build, and we know our data is safe, accessible, and always available.”

As a result, Nanit has unlocked completely new use cases, including:

• Streamlined event sourcing. Services can consume business events directly from Redpanda, increasing reliability and reducing dependency between services.

• Unified data to determine user eligibility. Instead of querying multiple microservices, the team uses a Redpanda topic to get a unified view of all the data needed to determine user eligibility for new features.

• Built-in simplicity. Redpanda Connect pushes data from topics to Parquet files on Amazon S3, skipping the need to maintain Kafka Connect separately.

As Nanit continues to scale, Redpanda scales with them. Recently, the team doubled its cluster capacity without any downtime, disruption, or operational headaches. Now, Nanit’s team finally has the peace of mind they need to expand the world of smart baby monitoring for the latest generation of parents.