Case Study: Teads streamlines operations with 87% fewer Kafka brokers
Key results
The challenge
Teads is an omnichannel advertising platform serving 2.2 billion users, where each ad impression generates a billable event. Its team self-managed open-source Kafka with ZooKeeper and Cruise Control across 500 brokers, tracking billions of daily events on stitched-together infrastructure that carried outage risk and blocked upgrades.
The solution
After evaluating Confluent, Pulsar, and Strimzi, Teads migrated its entire Kafka fleet to Redpanda Self-Managed on AWS, removing the need for ZooKeeper and Cruise Control and adopting a replication factor of three with tiered storage to Amazon S3.
“I recommend Redpanda to anybody running a significant event-based workload. It's Kafka-compliant, comes with batteries included, and brings beautiful operational simplicity.”
JPJason PosthumaDirector of Core Infrastructure, Teads
The results, in context
Teads dropped its Kafka broker count from 500 to just 63 while maintaining the same workload, an 87% reduction that significantly cut AWS hardware costs. The platform continues to track roughly 100 billion events daily, and the team completed its first upgrade in years on the Redpanda deployment.