The other clouds have fees like this too. Even if this were to change, using object storage results in a lot of operational simplicity as well compared to mana

The other clouds have fees like this too. Even if this were to change, using object storage results in a lot of operational simplicity as well compared to managing a bunch of disks. You can easily and quickly scale to zero or scale up to handle bursts in traffic. An architecture like this also makes it possible to achieve a truly active-active multi-region Kafka cluster that has real SLAs. See: https://buf.build/blog/bufstream-multi-region https://buf.build/blog/bufstream-multi-region (disclosure: I work at Buf)