We've rigorously tested Bufstream with the OpenMessaging Benchmark Framework. Here's the results:
Bufstream is a next-gen data streaming solution that's 10x cheaper to deploy than Apache Kafka, with 100% hashtag#Kafka protocol compatibility, including exactly-once semantics (EOS) and transaction support.
We tested Bufstream against a standard workload: 1 topic, 288 partitions, 1 GiB/s symmetric reads and writes. Using the OpenMessaging Benchmark Framework, we configured 64 producers and sent 1 GiB/s of uncompressed data to 64 consumers.
The setup used 6 Bufstream agents on m6in.xlarge instances across 3 availability zones, with S3 as primary storage. It easily handled 1 GiB/s uncompressed writes (256 MiB/s compressed).
Bufstream brokers used m6in.xlarge instances (4 vCPUs and 16 GiB) and only needed <1 of 4 vCPUs and <75% memory. Brokers coordinate using a 3-node etcd cluster on m6in.large instances (2 vCPUs and 8 GiB of memory each) managed metadata using minimal resources.
Median latency was 260ms, and p99 was 500ms - absolutely acceptable for high-volume analytics driving most Kafka deployments.
Assuming 7-day retention, this Bufstream cluster costs $11,147/month in AWS us-east, including all infrastructure and Buf's usage fee.
Compute: $1,112/month
Storage: $4,625/month (153 TiB written to S3)
Networking: $226/month
Buf usage fee: $5,184/month
An equivalent Kafka cluster would cost $116,460/month, plus additional vendor licensing fees:
Compute: $8,039/month (57 r4.xlarge instances)
Storage: $73,689/month (906 TiB of EBS volumes)
Networking: $34,732/month (2.67 GiB/s inter-zone traffic)
Bufstream delivers dramatic cost savings by leveraging cloud object stores while supporting the full Kafka protocol. For most workloads, the minimal latency increase is well worth the 10x cost reduction.
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