"...we needed to ensure WarpStream could also support our scalability needs before settling on it. Given the size of Grafana Cloud Metrics, we knew it needed to handle read and write rates of tens of gigabytes per second."

Character.AI operates at scale, supporting over 20 million monthly active users across our services. Despite being a relatively small company, Character.AI services have significant and complex data storage needs.

Benchmarking databases – and maintaining fairness and integrity while doing so – is a notoriously difficult task to get right, especially in the data streaming space. Vendors want their systems to produce mouth watering results, and so unnatural configurations divorced from customer realities (AKA “vanity” benchmarks) get tested, and it's ultimately the end-user that is left holding the bag when they realize that their actual TCO is a lot higher than they were led to believe.