StreamNative has introduced Ursa, a new diskless storage engine for Kafka that uses Iceberg for storage, offering 10x lower infrastructure costs, instant scalability, and simplified operations by leveraging S3 for replication. The engine is part of their forked Kafka 4.2 version and supports both classic and new write/read paths. This move highlights the industry's shift toward open-source solutions and addresses key pain points in Kafka's state management.
Background
Kafka is a widely-used distributed event streaming platform, but its traditional storage model involves high costs and operational complexity due to stateful brokers and disk dependencies. The industry is increasingly adopting open-source alternatives to address these limitations.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026 at 11:55 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10