Startups and SMBs finding success with DigitalOcean Managed Kafka

Last month, DigitalOcean released Managed Kafka, which provides startups and small-to-midsize businesses with the power of Apache Kafka, in an affordable, easy-to-manage package from DigitalOcean. Kafka is a powerful open-source event streaming platform, but self-managing it can be complex and time-consuming.

Since the launch of DigitalOcean Managed Kafka, which is now available in General Availability (GA), many customers have found value in the simplicity and affordability of DigitalOcean Managed Kafka. Read on to hear how DigitalOcean customers are leveraging the power of Managed Kafka to grow their businesses.

Kafka without the complexity

Setting up, maintaining, and monitoring Kafka daily through self-managing has many challenges. However, Managed Kafka provides an experience that has made these daunting tasks much easier for our customers.

Datacake, a low-code IoT platform, can better focus on product development, saying that “DigitalOcean’s Managed Kafka offering has been a game-changer for us at Datacake. By taking care of the operational aspects of running our Kafka cluster, we have been able to focus our attention on what really matters - building a great product.” - Lukas Klein, Chief Technical Officer, Datacake

Kairos Sports Tech, which provides operation and communications for major sports teams, has implemented Managed Kafka for usage in production workloads and has many important customers of their own who rely on their systems.

“… we were self-managing Kafka, and found the day-to-day management of running a multi-node system was time-consuming and full of complexities.” said Daniel Hendrie who is the Chief Technical Officer.

Thanks to the simplicity of Managed Kafka in the handling of complicated tasks, Kairos Sports Tech was able to save time and resources. Also, the ease of use led them to get to production much faster.

“DigitalOcean Managed Kafka simplified and sped up our management of Kafka—self-managing Kafka, it would take about eight weeks to go from initial development to a production-ready system. With DigitalOcean Managed Kafka, we cut that timeline to just one week.”

DigitalOcean Managed Kafka continues to provide simplicity at its core. To get a better overview of the simplicity offered, please check out this video on how to get started to see the simplicity for yourself.

Affordable, transparent pricing means businesses of all sizes can use Kafka

Many managed Kafka services from other providers are extremely expensive and therefore are not viable options for SMBs, who then are forced to use self-managed Kafka, which is costly in the time it takes to administer. However, DigitalOcean Managed Kafka’s starting price of $147 is perfect for helping SMBs get started using Managed Kafka.

In addition, other providers have complicated pricing schemes for Managed Kafka, with separate costs for each broker, added storage, and additional add-on features. With DigitialOcean Managed Kafka, prices are predictable with a single, flat rate price that is shown to you when creating a cluster.

Another key factor for any customer is to pay for what you need and avoid underutilization when going from development to production with Kafka, which can take a couple of months. With other providers, customers might have to pay a higher price for a production-grade cluster when usage is low or be locked in a short-term trial period.

DigitalOcean pricing provides cost-effective pricing for both testing and production so anyone can get started with Managed Kafka for testing purposes. When it’s time to go live to production, customers can easily scale up their existing cluster to any of our dedicated vCPU plans, as seen below, and just pay for the additional usage when ready.

Try Managed Kafka today

Designed for SMBs with simplicity and affordability in mind, DigitalOcean Managed Kafka is now available in GA for all of your production workloads. Learn more about Managed Kafka in our docs, and start taking advantage of the benefits of Managed Kafka today by signing up for a DigitalOcean account.

Need help regarding Managed Kafka? Contact our sales team or connect with a DigitalOcean Partner who can advise you on architecture reviews, deployments, migration support, and other infrastructure assistance.