The 'Agentic Enterprise' is a Lie Without Real-Time Data (Why We Chose Redpanda)
Batch processing is for boomers. Why we bet the farm on Redpanda to power our event-driven agent swarms, and why your 'autonomous' agent is actually just a slow cron job.
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Let’s be honest for a second. Most so-called "Agentic Workflows" in the enterprise are embarrassing. You have a "sophisticated" LLM reasoning engine that is making critical business decisions based on data from a data warehouse that was last updated... checks notes... yesterday at midnight.
That's not an agent. That's a glorified cron job with a personality disorder.
At Reinforced, we realized that if we wanted to build actual autonomous agents—the kind that stop fraud while it's happening, or reroute supply chains before the ship gets stuck—we needed to kill the batch job. We needed speed. We needed violence. We needed Redpanda.
Latency is Death
In the world of high-frequency trading, a millisecond is worth millions. In the world of AI agents, it's worth sanity. Imagine an agent trying to debug a production outage using logs that are 5 minutes old. It's like trying to drive a Formula 1 car while looking at a polaroid picture of the track.
We benchmarked everything. Kafka (too heavy, requires a JVM zoo). Pulsar (too complex). RabbitMQ (lol). Redpanda was the only thing that could handle the throughput of 10,000 agents screaming at each other without requiring a dedicated DevOps team to keep it alive.
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The Architecture of a Swarm
Here is how we built the nervous system of our agent fleet. It's not a "pipeline." Pipelines are for oil. This is a reflex arc.
This isn't theoretical. We have fraud detection agents that ingest transaction streams directly from Redpanda, run an inference step (using a quantized model cached in VRAM), and publish a block_transaction event in under 45ms. That is faster than the user can blink.
Why We Ditched the JVM
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Our agents run on bare metal. We care about every cycle. Running a JVM-based message broker next to highly optimized CUDA inference runtimes felt wrong. It felt heavy. Redpanda is C++. It acts like a database, it uses a thread-per-core model, and it doesn't have garbage collection pauses that make our agents hallucinate.
When you are building systems that might control physical infrastructure, "Stop-the-world" GC pauses are not an option.
The Agentic Service Mesh
We are moving toward a world where APIs are obsolete. Agents won't call GET /users/123. They will subscribe to the UserUpdates topic. They won't POST /orders. They will publish to the OrderIntent stream.
The database is turning inside out. And Redpanda is the backbone. If you're still building "Request/Response" agents, you're building for the past. Get on the stream or get left in the buffer.
