DEVOPSdigest

Redpanda announced its acquisition of London-based Benthos, the open-source stream processing platform that enables enterprises to move, integrate, and perform transformations on streams of data flowing between systems and data sources.

The acquisition completes Redpanda as a unified, end-to-end streaming data platform built close to the hardware to be more performant, simpler to deploy and easier to operate, with greater enterprise reliability versus the combination of Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect.

“Our users can now go from anywhere to anywhere. Redpanda Connect – through our Benthos acquisition – is now the most complete connectivity framework for the Kafka ecosystem,” said Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Redpanda. “There simply does not exist a more complete, end-to-end platform for streaming your data – one that spans every single form factor from embedded IoT devices to the largest cloud workloads. Gone are the days of suffering through multiple projects that manually stitch data from your streams to your data warehouse or operational database. We are super proud to bring the simplest connectivity and ecosystem to the Redpanda family.”

Benthos, which is now called Redpanda Connect, utilizes the modern, cloud-native design of Go to deliver optimized performance for an ecosystem of more than 220 pre-built connectors. It lets engineers quickly build connectivity to streaming sources, transforming data pipelines to power real-time data products. Benthos is used widely by hundreds of leading brands, powering robust 50GB/s applications while providing deep observability with developer tooling from CLI and SDKs, to config validation, debugging, and tracing. Like Redpanda, the newly acquired Redpanda Connect technology is resource efficient, requiring 3x less compute resources than Kafka Connect.

The former Benthos team has joined Redpanda as part of the acquisition. "The combination of our streaming connectivity technology and Redpanda is a game-changer to the industry," said Ashley Jeffs, founder of Benthos. "We're ushering in a new era of real-time data autonomy — developers can now ingest, process and land data from any source through a simple, unified platform with levels of efficiency and power that were never before possible."

With Redpanda Connect, the Redpanda streaming data platform easily connects with a wealth of AI systems, databases, data warehouses, applications and files to streamline and simplify the creation of composable data products. Example integrations include: Meroxa to bridge data sources and destinations, Ockam to enable zero-trust across the entire Redpanda ecosystem, and PeerDB for native Postgres change data capture.

Redpanda Connect is now available and fully integrated with Redpanda Enterprise and Redpanda Community editions.