Ursa: A Leaderless, Object Storage–Based Alternative to Kafka

Re:Ursa: A Leaderless, Object Storage–Based Alternative to K... by davidkj on Thursday July 31, 2025 @01:26PM (#44747899)

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...

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Re:Ursa: A Leaderless, Object Storage–Based Alternative to K... by x0x0 on Thursday July 31, 2025 @02:44PM (#44748770)

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 the service, didn't have a lot of usage variance.

This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb-_4r1N6eg was an interesting watch, btw.

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Re:Ursa: A Leaderless, Object Storage–Based Alternative to K... by enether on Monday August 11, 2025 @11:49AM (#44865576)

Yes, see WarpStream, Confluent Freight and Diskless Kafka for other examples

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