# Scalability, Reliability And Cost-Effectiveness The primary challenge in scaling an enterprise-grade software system and making it reliable, without losing your shirt, is most often related to data storage and retrieval. Hence, we have primarily focused our attention on selecting the world's best data storage technologies for the purpose of making systems built on the Cillers platform scalable, reliable and cost-effective. We have selected Couchbase for operational data, because it is typically used to save engineering organizations that face scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness issues. Couchbase is used to power many of the world's most critical software systems, such as most credit card transactions, logins, bookings, billings, taxis, social media posts, space flights etc. We have selected Redpanda for event streaming data and data integrations because it is much easier to scale and make reliable in a cost-effective way than Kafka and other Kafka-based services. Redpanda is a Kafka drop-in replacement written in C++, which means that it doesn't suffer from the inefficiencies of Java, most notably delays in event processing caused by garbage-collection. Redpanda is gaining momentum and is used in an increasing number of the world's most critical systems, such as NYSE, Vodaphone and Cisco. When it comes to big data, Databricks has little competition. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.bluetext.dev/system-overview/scalability-reliability-and-cost-effectiveness.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.