Me and my shadow (link!): Disaster recovery replication made easy

Redpanda's Shadow Linking is a broker-native disaster recovery feature that replicates streaming data between clusters with offset fidelity, no external tooling, and minimal operational complexity. Unlike Apache MirrorMaker 2.0, it runs inside the broker (written in C++), preserves offsets exactly, replicates topic configs, consumer group offsets, ACLs, and schema registry data. The architecture is active-passive: the shadow cluster stays read-only until failover. Key advantages include no JVM tuning, no extra hardware, and performance tested at 2.5 GiB/s with sub-10,000 message lag (~4ms RPO). Reciprocal active-passive setups across two regions are also supported via parallel shadow links. Configuration is available via rpk CLI, REST, Kubernetes operator, or browser console, with Prometheus-compatible metrics built in.