How Grafana Mimir Cut Costs 25%: Kafka and WarpStream at Massive Scale | Big Tent S3E3

Big Tent hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie talk with Marco Pracucci (Grafana Labs), Cyril Tovena (Grafana Labs), and Ryan Worl (WarpStream/Confluent) about building Sigyn (the internal code name for Mimir’s next-gen architecture), public, open source, and designed for lower TCO and stronger reliability. They cover gapless consumption, predictable partitioning, new “block builder” components, and the practical realities of migrating “mid-flight.”

Timestamps:
00:00:00 Welcome to Season 3 of Grafana’s Big Tent

03:53 Setting the stage: Mimir and why architecture matters

08:45 Costs, replication, and scalability limits

13:48 Kafka, aggregation, and architectural shifts

19:13 Decoupling read and write paths

24:38 Object storage, Snowflake, and cost tradeoffs

29:41 Latency vs durability in event systems

34:55 Single-cluster scalability and big-tenant design

39:50 Sigyn architecture and real-world reliability gains

44:55 Block building, compaction, and storage efficiency

49:20 LLM tools, Claude, and modern developer workflows

54:03 Designing systems for future flexibility

59:22 Closing thoughts and wrap-up

Links/resources:
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