Benchmarking Diskless Topics: Part 1
We benchmarked Diskless Kafka (KIP-1150) with 1 GiB/s in, 3 GiB/s out workload across three AZs. The cluster ran on just six m8g.4xlarge machines, sitting at <30% CPU, delivering ~1.6 seconds P99 end-to-end latency - all while cutting infra spend from ≈$3.32 M a year to under $288k a year. That’s a >94% cloud cost reduction. Extending Apache Kafka does come with an explicit tax.