Life in the Slow Lane: Cost-Efficient Streaming Through Latency Tiering

Everyone loves real-time data… until the cloud bill arrives.

At Wix, we stream over 40 billion events a day through our analytics pipeline, and for years, everything flowed through one giant, expensive, ultra-fast Kafka setup. Because “real-time is always better,” right?

Well… no.

In this talk, we’ll challenge one of the streaming world’s favorite myths: that faster is always better. We’ll show how we broke our single monolithic pipeline into a multi-lane architecture - where each lane is optimized differently for varying latency and cost requirements. Along the way, we’ll explore what “fast” really means for different use cases, why one size rarely fits all and why the new generation of “diskless” Kafka changed the game on the ability to optimize your streaming stack.

If you’ve ever wondered how to balance latency, cost, and sanity in large-scale event systems, or if you just want to hear how we managed to make Kafka slower on purpose while also saving a few bucks, come join the ride. Your cloud bill may thank you.