Many things in the tech industry are fleeting. Startups come and go, products change and evolve, new ideas strike like lightning and sometimes fizzle out just as fast. But there are always people who stand out and stand firm—those rare pillars of the community who readily lend a hand to whoever needs it, and serve as trusted beacons of knowledge. They come from all industries and walks of life, and can mean the difference between being stuck on an issue for days or completing a project.

In the Redpanda Community, our team keeps a close eye on these helpful heroes, and each quarter, we select one to become our Community Champion. Last quarter, we awarded Erlend Faxvaag—a data analyst who uses Redpanda in the fascinating field of IoT. This time, we’re incredibly proud to announce our new Community Champion: Rauan Mayemir!

His journey with Redpanda is an inspiring tale of discovery, adoption, and innovation. So let’s get to know a little more about Rauan, how he’s using Redpanda in his professional life, and what the Redpanda Community means to him.

The story behind Rauan

Rauan is a founder of Buhta, a financial services company based in Kazakhstan that he playfully describes as a "glorified accountant."

It began with building an accounting system for small business owners, catering to entrepreneurs with relatively low transaction volumes. Slowly, the accounting system grew into something much more intricate. The system evolved into a comprehensive platform that encompasses not only accounting but also payment management, third-party vendor integration, payroll services, and much more.

This transformation highlights the adaptability and scalability of the platform—but such a fast-evolving platform requires a robust and flexible technology stack to support its growth and compliance requirements.

It all started with a podcast

Finding Redpanda was a serendipitous discovery. While he had been keeping an eye on the Apache Kafka® ecosystem for some time, he hadn’t found a use case that warranted the complexity of deploying and maintaining Kafka.

That changed when Rauan accidentally stumbled on a data engineering podcast episode featuring our Founder and CEO, Alex Gallego, where he discusses the implementation and vision behind Redpanda.

“I found it so inspiring and insightful. He really did open up a world of ideas for me, and I also loved what he was trying to accomplish with Redpanda.” - Rauan Mayemir

The podcast resonated with the direction he envisioned for his own technology stack, and so Rauan turned his attention to exploring Redpanda. He began with a relatively simple use case but one that held immense importance – the Transactional Outbox Pattern for a payment system.

In the context of Interpay’s mission-critical workloads, which included persisting payments and orders, they needed a reliable way to carry out these tasks. The traditional approach of sending data to offline queues has its risks, especially concerning the potential for failures.

Adopting Redpanda enabled them to gather vital events and ensure their execution. Instead of depending on fragile offline queues, they could now rely on Redpanda's robustness and scalability to ensure the seamless processing of mission-critical data. They simply store the data in a database and then use Debezium, along with the read-ahead log, to forward the payment transaction event.

This transformation not only upgraded their reliability but also reduced the complexity of their main processing path—streamlining their operations. As their experience with the platform grew, they realized its potential for handling other types of data. Their logs, for example, were initially considered as just structured records of events. These logs evolved into an integral part of their system, like shaping their business processes and compliance requirements rather than just for monitoring purposes.

Redpanda's ability to store and process vast amounts of data—combined with its powerful real-time streaming capabilities—made it the perfect choice for handling mission-critical data and also effectively managing their logs.

This decision marked a significant expansion of Redpanda's role within Interpay’s tech stack, showcasing its versatility and adaptability.

Joining the Redpanda Community

Just like with our previous champion, joining a tight-knit Slack Community buzzing with like-minded tech folks seemed like a logical step. Rauan became an active participant in the Redpanda Community, not only by asking our team intelligent questions and helping us smooth out the developer experience, but also by sharing valuable contributions and creating detailed documentation, like how to monitor Redpanda inside Kubernetes.

“It’s a good feeling to participate in the Community and get feedback from them. It’s nice to know you’re contributing and creating something that can really inspire and help others.” - Rauan Mayemir

So, please join us in congratulating Rauan and recognizing his role in helping and growing the Redpanda Community—within Slack and beyond!

Want to be our next Community Champion?

Every movement needs a community, and you can become the next hero helping us build the future of streaming data. Here’s what you can do to get on our team’s radar and earn a generous bounty of Redpanda swag as our shiny new champion:

• Be active in the Community Slack - get your name noticed!

• Contribute to our GitHub repo

• Be a good human (kindness is always rewarded)

Want to join Rauan and thousands of like-minded developers and engineers? Every hero starts somewhere, so take the first step and introduce yourself in our Redpanda Community on Slack.