Redpanda

Redpanda is Watasu’s streaming platform. It speaks the Kafka protocol, so existing Kafka clients work unchanged.

Use Redpanda when you need ordered, durable, replayable event streams — and when “publish to a topic, consume from a topic” is the right shape for your problem.

Good fits

• analytics and product event pipelines
• audit and event-sourcing buses
• decoupling services that don’t need synchronous responses
• ingestion buffers in front of slower downstream systems

Create

watasu addons:create redpanda --app my-app

After attachment, your app receives Redpanda connection details (broker addresses, credentials) as config vars. Use any Kafka-compatible client library.

Redpanda vs. Valkey

People reach for both for “queues.” They’re not the same:

	Valkey	Redpanda
Ordering	Best-effort	Strict per partition
Durability	Optional, plan-dependent	Built in
Replay	No	Yes (consumer offsets)
Best for	Speed, ephemeral coordination	Durable event flow

If you’d lose sleep over dropped messages, you want Redpanda.

Durability

Redpanda is replicated and durable by design. Retention is controlled by topic configuration — you decide how long to keep messages, and consumers can replay from any retained offset.

There isn’t a Watasu-side scheduled backup product for Redpanda the way there is for SQL databases. Design retention and downstream durability deliberately for your use case.