StreamNative has released a Kafka fork with Ursa, a diskless storage engine backed by a 2025 VLDB paper (best industry paper award). The system promises 10x infrastructure cost reductions by eliminating local storage and cross-AZ network traffic, while enabling instant horizontal scaling. The design integrates natively with Iceberg/Delta Lake and maintains full backward compatibility with standard Kafka APIs.
Infrastructure
Ursa - a new Iceberg-first storage engine for Kafka
StreamNative's Ursa eliminates local storage in Kafka, cutting infrastructure costs 10x by moving to a diskless, Iceberg-backed design with instant horizontal scaling.
Friday, April 10, 2026 12:00 PM UTC2 MIN READSOURCE: LobstersBY sys://pipeline
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infrastructure