Uncovering Kafka’s Hidden Infrastructure Costs

What this post added

This post details the infrastructure costs of running Kafka, highlighting networking as the biggest cost driver (over 50% of infrastructure costs). It breaks down costs for compute, storage, and networking, providing example calculations for different ingress rates. It emphasizes the importance of cross-AZ traffic for producers, consumers, and partition replication as the primary driver of networking costs. The post also touches upon the impact of utilization and introduces a four-part series on understanding and optimizing Kafka costs, with subsequent posts focusing on operations, general cost reduction, and a savings challenge.