ShareChat reduces cloud costs by 70% with Redpanda BYOC

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.