Middleware is a cloud observability company that uses AI to help customers identify, understand, and fix issues across their infrastructure. They rely on scalable streaming infrastructure to ingest and process tens of TiBs of telemetry every day. Initially, they used Apache Kafka as a scalable queue between event intake and downstream storage systems, but faced scalability issues with customer workloads being unpredictable and requiring frequent partition rebalancing. To mitigate this, they over-provisioned broker VMs, which drove up cloud infrastructure costs significantly. They also ran their critical infrastructure in three availability zones to ensure reliability, resulting in high inter-zone networking fees. Middleware's data ingestion and storage team then adopted Warpstream, a cost-effective alternative that saved them more than 85% compared to their previous setup, allowing them to focus on developing features for customers instead of managing scaling issues.