[llama052]

We really wanted to try redpanda, but operationally it does not appear to be very k8s* native and infact looks like a lot of one off hand holding to get it working properly.

Hopefully that can get ironed out in the future. Until then we will stick with the Strimzi operator and kafka.

Also Confluent is absolutely pricing themselves out of the market. We looked at their self hosted confluent operator and they wanted something like $9k per node, when they do nothing but provide an operator. Insanity.

[agallego]

our real storage is s3 - local disk is for staging/raft layer. how is that not cloud native. if you are referring to cloud native as k8s it is true that our k8s operator was built mostly for our cloud but we released it... the good news is a new interface (same code) w/ more friendly user-defaults is about to get released. you can track it all on github tho.

[llama052]

Oh I see the operator now, looks decent. Before the deployment documentation I had found was very manual and full of a lot of pod exec commands.

Worked with many operators in the wild and anything that gives you more control through CRD/automation and less manual pod intervention is a huge win, let's us bake into our already existing pipelines for deployment and releases also. The Confluent($$$$)/Strimzi operators do well on that front. I'm super excited to have competition in this space!

I'll keep an eye out for the new release!

[agallego]

totally. we built a new team focused on the dev experience of k8s alone. 90seconds to prod (on a working eks cluster) with TLS, external certs, etc. That's the benchmark we're trying to hit :)

[winrid]

MongoDB Enterprise is 8-20k per node and they just provide management software and support.

[northstar702]

Curious which version you tried and what k8s environment did you explore?