[deniscoady]

I'm an employee at Redpanda.

> Redpanda recently introduced leader pinning, but this only benefits setups where producers are confined to a single AZ—not applicable to our multi-AZ benchmark.

Redpanda has leadership pinning (producers) and follower fetching (consumers). I suspect a significant amount of cost is improper shaping of traffic.

> Interzone traffic - replication: 10GB/s * $0.02/GB(in+out) * 3600 = $720

With follower fetching you shouldn't have cross-AZ charges on read, only on replication. In 15 seconds of looking at this piece I cut out $360/hour...no offense but this reeks of bad faith benchmarketing...