ShareChat reduces cloud costs by 70% with Redpanda BYOC

How India’s largest social media company optimized its event streaming platform to handle tremendous scale at low cost

Graphic for downloading streaming data report
Graphic for downloading streaming data report
Graphic for downloading streaming data report
Graphic for downloading streaming data report
Website:
Industry:
Size:
Use Cases:
Redpanda Products:
Key Integrations:

Challenge

Climbing costs and increasing operational complexity

ShareChat is an Indian social networking service with over 350 million monthly active users across 15 local languages. As India’s largest social media platform, ShareChat processes massive volumes of data, including user engagement events, ad funnel analysis, and AI-driven recommendation systems.

Initially, ShareChat’s event-streaming system relied on Google Pub/Sub. However, with ShareChat’s ambitious scale and volume of events, the system faced several challenges:

  • Huge cloud costs due to inefficient batching and compression mechanisms
  • Operational complexity with limited visibility into errors and performance issues
  • Scaling limitations during high-traffic events, leading to increased costs and reduced efficiency.

As a result, ShareChat needed a streaming data solution that could handle its growing data volume while reducing operational overhead and infrastructure costs.

Why Redpanda

Cost-efficiency and simplicity — even at tremendous scale

ShareChat’s engineers loved the Apache Kafka® ecosystem, so they set out to find a Kafka-compatible system without the typical Kafka costs and complexity. Once they found Redpanda, the choice was easy for several key reasons:

  • Reduced operational cost and complexity 
  • Kafka API compatibility to easily migrate from Pub/Sub
  • Raft architecture and Tiered Storage for zero data loss
  • Hands-off reliability engineering to free ShareChat’s team
  • Complete data ownership and control using Redpanda BYOC

With all of ShareChat’s boxes ticked and after passing the team’s stress tests with flying colors, ShareChat onboarded Redpanda Cloud’s fully managed BYOC offering — with much-appreciated help from Redpanda. 

“The support from the Redpanda SRE team has been very impressive. Multiple instances of prompt support, customization of configuration for our use case, and proactive and reactive maintenance,” says Arya Ketan, Senior Principal Engineer at ShareChat.

Results

A low-cost, high-performing, next-gen event streaming platform

Since moving from Pub/Sub to Redpanda BYOC, ShareChat has cut its cloud infrastructure spend by ~70%, saving millions of USD annually. With a streamlined architecture now delivering 3 GBps throughput at ~5 million messages per second on fewer than 40 nodes, ShareChat can jump into new use cases without stressing over infrastructure costs.

Redpanda BYOC not only reduces costs and complexity, but gives ShareChat full control over its data within its own infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), ensuring compliance with evolving data protection regulations.

“With Redpanda’s BYOC deployment, data remains within the realms of our infrastructure boundary, which makes us sleep better,” Arya says. “It keeps our data protected against changing data compliance requirements without worrying about large volumes of work later on.”

One of ShareChat’s challenges with Pub/Sub was limited visibility into errors and performance issues. Now with enhanced observability tools providing a rich set of metrics, ShareChat’s team can quickly understand production and consumption patterns from a single pane, leading to 10x developer productivity.

Furthermore, Redpanda’s hands-off reliability engineering frees ShareChat’s team to focus on product development rather than infrastructure maintenance. They can also offload the pressure of scaling during high-traffic events to Redpanda. For example, on Diwali or Indian Independence Day when ShareChat expects upwards of 50% additional traffic, Redpanda ensured seamless scaling with no downtime or noticeably impacting end users.

With all of these benefits from a single platform, Redpanda is now an integral component in ShareChat’s architecture. And, as Redpanda Cloud continues to evolve, ShareChat looks forward to embracing new capabilities, like Redpanda’s Apache Iceberg Topics, to further optimize its streaming data architecture and better serve millions of users.

“We have reduced our cloud infrastructure spend by about 70%, saving millions of USD annually. We are now scaling up new use cases on our event streaming architecture without worrying about spiralling infrastructure costs.”

Senior Principal Engineer, ShareChat
Arya Ketan

Have a similar challenge? Chat with us

By submitting, I agree to receive communications from Redpanda, and I understand Redpanda will process and store my data as described in the Privacy Policy.
Download:
Download Case Study

Read more success stories

View all success stories
Finance
Zafin

How Zafin swapped in Redpanda and instantly simplified operations to accelerate business agility for its customers.

Real-time analytics
Software Development
Poolside

How poolside freed its team to train LLMs faster and create better AI models thanks to Redpanda Cloud.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
Hospitality
The Hotels Network

How THN shifted from managing Apache Kafka® to creating data-driven opportunities for hotels worldwide.

Real-time analytics
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
Gaming
Fortis Games

How Redpanda's streamlined architecture is powering the future of the games industry.

Real-time analytics
Analytics
Goldsky

How a leading real-time data platform for blockchains is making streaming data accessible for app developers

Real-time analytics
Cybersecurity
Lacework

How Lacework’s cloud security platform maximized performance and minimized storage costs with Redpanda

Observability
TAKE A DEEP DIVE

Start building with Redpanda

Spin up within minutes  |  No credit card required