How Knock Saved $87K a Year by Migrating Off Kinesis to WarpStream

Knock, an agent-native customer engagement platform, replaced its Amazon Kinesis-based data streaming system with WarpStream in mid-2026 to reduce infrastructure costs and simplify operations. Its previous Kinesis setup, used for messaging events, logs, and workflow updates, relied on an Elixir community driver without enhanced fan-out support, requiring a custom “manifold” architecture that duplicated data across streams, increased costs, and occasionally created inconsistencies. After evaluating alternatives including RabbitMQ, SNS/SQS, Pulsar, and Kafka, Knock chose WarpStream for its Kafka compatibility, Elixir ecosystem support, bring-your-own-cloud model that retains customer data in Knock’s S3 accounts, and ClickHouse ClickPipes integration. One engineer completed the disruption-free migration of five topics and roughly 20 consumers in about a month by operating both systems concurrently and gradually shifting traffic through feature flags. WarpStream now supports 10,000–15,000 messages per second with sub-two-second latency and is expected to lower annual streaming costs from approximately $112,000 to $25,000, a projected 77% reduction, while enabling easier consumer scaling, Kafka-native fan-out and fan-in, improved observability, and a simpler, more reliable architecture.

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