Not all streaming data services can handle mission-critical workloads. Amazon MSK is one of many services built on Kafka (a legacy infrastructure), making its performance unreliable and expensive for high throughput workloads. Redpanda Cloud is built on a powerful streaming data engine that uses Kafka APIs—but without the cost or complexity—and supports mission-critical, high-performance data streams with up to 10x lower latency and 6x lower total cost of ownership (TCO) versus Kafka.
AWS offers a marketplace of options to support your real-time data streams. Two popular choices for fully managed data streaming are Redpanda Cloud and Amazon MSK. When evaluating these services, it’s critical to think about your needs for administration, performance, and reliability.
| Capability | Redpanda Cloud | Amazon MSK | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully managed streaming data platform |  | - | Redpanda Cloud includes brokers, HTTP proxy, schema registry, and Raft consensus built-in. MSK offers Kafka brokers and ZooKeeper nodes; HTTP proxy and schema registry need to be self-managed. |
| Fully managed upgrades and patching | | - | Version upgrades and patching are fully managed by Redpanda. MSK provides automatic hardware patches, but version upgrades are self-managed by the customer. |
| Apache Kafka compatibility | | | Both solutions offer a native Kafka API, no need to rewrite existing apps. |
| Integrated user interface | | - | Redpanda Console is a fully integrated user interface, also compatible with Kafka. With MSK, must use 3rd party tools like Redpanda Console. |
| Flexible Single and Multi-AZ deployments | | - | Redpanda cloud offers Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployment options. MSK offers Multi-AZ only which means complexity even when you don’t require it. |
| Data and partition balancing | | - | Redpanda Cloud features automatic data and partition balancing, allowing for hands-free ops. With MSK, you need a 3rd party tool (Cruise Control) for partition and data balancing. |
| Integrated monitoring | | | Redpanda Cloud offers monitoring available natively via Prometheus. In the case of MSK, monitoring available via CloudWatch (charged separately). |
| Managed data connectors | | - | With Redpanda Cloud, you get fully managed connectors for popular databases, storage, and analytics tools. MSK offers only self-managed connectors. |
| Multi-cloud | | - | Redpanda Cloud supports AWS and GCP today (Azure coming soon). Amazon MSK is limited to AWS. |
| Capability | Redpanda Cloud | Amazon MSK | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10x performance of Kafka | | - | Redpanda Cloud leverages Redpanda platform, which achieves up to 10x lower average latencies vs Apache Kafka. Amazon MSK is based on vanilla Apache Kafka. |
| Optimized resource efficiency | | - | Redpanda uses 3-6x fewer compute resources than Apache Kafka when running the same workload, allowing for lower cloud spend in Redpanda Cloud. Amazon MSK is based on vanilla Apache Kafka. |
| Tiered storage | | Limited | Redpanda Cloud features tiered storage to support retention limits and compaction for topics. However, with MSK, due to Kafka limitation, compacted topics cannot use tiered storage. |
| Capability | Redpanda Cloud | Amazon MSK | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Durability | | - | Redpanda Cloud uses Raft-native replication and is Jepsen-verified to be safe for data. MSK uses Apache Kafka ISR for replication, which can be subject to unsafe leader election and data loss. |
| SLA | | | Both services feature a 99.9% uptime SLA. |
| Data sovereignty | | | Redpanda offers BYOC clusters, where data doesn’t leave your VPC, whether in AWS or GCP. In MSK, data doesn’t leave your VPC (limited to AWS) |
- Sandy Wilbourn
VP Carrier Division, Akamai Technologies
- Chip Turner
Engineering Director, Lacework
- Colin Riddell
Director of Data Engineering, Fortis Games
- Jordi Miró Bruix
CTO, The Hotels Network
With Redpanda Cloud, your cluster operations are fully managed by Redpanda SREs, including upgrades and patching with zero downtime, backup and recovery, data and partition balancing, and 24/7 support. All backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA.
Simplicity
Redpanda Cloud offers a complete streaming data platform in one fully managed service, including brokers, HTTP proxy, and schema registry. That leaves zero external dependencies for you to manage. And it's easy to get going with Redpanda's developer-friendly console, CLI, and API interfaces.
Performance
Redpanda's streaming data engine was designed to maximize the performance potential of modern infrastructure, resulting in 10x lower average latencies vs. Apache Kafka and Kafka-based services. This is due to innovations like Thread-per-Core architecture, C++ design, and async processing.
User Story
See how The Hotels Network leverages Redpanda Cloud to build build a real-time data platform for the hospitality industry.
Migration guide
Redpanda is Kafka API-compatible. See how easy it is to migrate from your current Kafka provider to Redpanda Cloud!
Ready to supercharge performance and simplify data pipelines? Give Redpanda a try or get in touch with us to learn more!
