Ursa: A leaderless, object storage–based alternative to Kafka

Post by enether » Mon, Aug 11, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #24

davidkj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the cost savings comes from the use of object storage rather than attached disks. This eliminates the inter-AZ networking costs associated with Kafka replication mechanism. I break all of the costs down in the following e-book. https://streamnative.io/ebooks/reducing-kafka-costs-with-lea...

So basically Kafka, to provide availability guarantees, requires multi-AZ and the inter-AZ replication gets expensive. And Ursa avoids that by using object storage and probably then just talking inter-AZ? And while I like Kafka, nobody would claim it likes being scaled up and down dynamically, so probably built-in tolerance for that as well? We ran Kafka on-prem so that wasn't an issue for us, and given the nature of…