Imagine a Kafka cluster with zero disks, zero inter-AZ costs, and zero cross-account IAM headaches. That's not a future promise—it's WarpStream's reality today. In a world where data streaming costs are spiraling out of control, this 12-person team is building the infrastructure layer that might make traditional Kafka obsolete.

"WarpStream isn't competing with Kafka—it's replacing the entire foundation it's built on."

The product strategy is brutally elegant. Traditional Kafka clusters are disk-bound, expensive to scale across availability zones, and require complex IAM configurations. WarpStream's diskless architecture sits directly on object storage (think S3), eliminating the I/O bottleneck and the cost explosion. It's not just cheaper—it's architecturally simpler. For data engineers drowning in operational overhead, this is a lifeline.

• Diskless architecture means instant scaling without hardware constraints
• Zero inter-AZ costs kill the hidden expense of multi-region data streaming
• Kafka compatibility ensures drop-in replacement, not a rewrite
• 12-person team suggests focused execution over feature bloat