Redpanda (Vectorized)

Redpanda (formerly Vectorized) is a high-performance streaming data platform that is Kafka API-compatible, built from the ground up in C++ to deliver exceptional throughput and low latency without the operational complexity of JVM-based systems. Founded by Alexander Gallego in 2019, Redpanda has raised over $100 million in funding and has over 10,000 stars as of 2026. Redpanda is designed as a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka, supporting the Kafka protocol, Kafka client libraries, and Kafka ecosystem tools like Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams, while eliminating the need for ZooKeeper, JVM tuning, and the Kafka Control Center. Key features include: Kafka API compatibility (supporting Kafka producers, consumers, admin APIs, and Kafka Connect framework, allowing existing Kafka applications to switch without code changes), thread-per-core architecture (a shared-nothing, thread-per-core design that eliminates locks and contention, achieving up to 6x higher throughput than Kafka on the same hardware), no external dependencies (no ZooKeeper, no JVM, and no external coordination services, with built-in Raft consensus for cluster coordination), zero-copy data path (bypassing user-space copies and delivering data directly from disk to network, minimizing CPU and memory overhead), inline tiered storage (automatically moving older data to cloud storage like S3 or GCS while keeping recent data on local NVMe, dramatically reducing storage costs for long-term retention), schema registry (built-in schema registry with support for Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema), Redpanda Connect (a stream processing engine for data transformation, similar to Kafka Streams or ksqlDB), transforms (WASM-based data transforms executed directly in the streaming engine), partition rebalancing (automatic partition rebalancing across cluster nodes during scaling events), and Docker and Kubernetes deployment (with Redpanda Operator for Kubernetes-native management).