A Kafka Proxy that *reduces* latency

Proxies are deployed to enhance observability, enforce security, and facilitate connectivity between clients and servers. However, these benefits usually come at a cost, as an additional "hop" is added to the critical data path.

We're building a high-performance, streaming-native protocol-agnostic proxy. After completing an OpenMessaging Benchmark on the proxy deployed in front of Apache Kafka, we've shown that it has near-zero impact on p99 latency, and actually absorbs and smooths out latency variation in a Kafka deployment, ensuring low and predictable latency at the 99th percentile, even under long-running, high-throughput workloads.

A link to the benchmark repo is included in the post to validate/confirm results.