I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.

We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.

I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.

Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...