Redpanda 64,862 Data sells the engine of Redpanda in three cloud forms, none of which was run here. Serverless is a multi-tenant service: you create a cluster in seconds and pay for use, metered as uptime, data in, data out, partitions per hour and storage; the rates sit in Redpanda's online calculator rather than on its documentation pages. Its per-cluster limits are generous for BookNest: 100 MB/s in and 300 MB/s out, 5,000 partitions, 20 MiB messages, 10,000 connections, 200 consumer groups, 30 users and 120 ACLs, unlimited retention. It runs in seven AWS 24 regions (and one Google Cloud 1 region in beta) without multiple availability zones, and lacks mutual TLS, role-based access control, Kafka Connect 129 and the HTTP proxy.
The free trial gives $100 of credit to spend in 30 days with no credit card. When it ends, clusters are suspended, and without a payment method within a seven-day grace period their data is permanently deleted, so the trial is a month of evaluation, not a free tier.
BYOC (bring your own cloud) runs Redpanda's data plane in your AWS, Google Cloud or Azure 6 account, managed by Redpanda's control plane, the same split as WarpStream (WarpStream) but with brokers on local disks. It is billed in Redpanda Processing Units (one RPU is 2 vCPUs with 8 GB of memory) plus data in, out and stored, on an annual commitment; Dedicated runs single-tenant clusters in Redpanda's own account. BYOC suits companies whose data must stay in their account; BookNest's small stream fits Serverless, priced in the calculator by its usage.