Redpanda has developed Cloud Topics as an innovative solution to address the rising demand for flexible latency requirements in real-time streaming data applications. This new feature allows data to be stored directly in cloud-based object storage, significantly reducing networking costs by replicating only critical metadata within Redpanda, while application data is sent to cloud storage without incurring network transfer fees. This approach caters to workloads that can tolerate higher latencies in exchange for lower costs, making it economically viable for applications such as cybersecurity, SIEM, and long-term observability storage. By leveraging its existing Raft implementation, Redpanda maintains operational simplicity and ensures that both Cloud Topics and regular low-latency topics can coexist within a single system, offering a versatile range of storage options and cost-performance tradeoffs. This enables a single Redpanda deployment to support diverse streaming workloads, meeting various operational and analytical needs while efficiently utilizing resources and reducing infrastructure costs.