Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re operating modern, data-driven applications—which, let’s face it, you likely are—Kafka serves as the central streaming platform, delivering data in real-time. It’s impressive, extremely fast, and exceptionally powerful for achieving high throughput and scalability. But here’s the catch: with significant power comes the need for vigilant oversight. Neglecting your Kafka environment is like driving a racecar with your eyes closed. It’s bound to end badly.

Win $5,000 by building a cool project using Aiven’s new free tier Kafka, and sharing it online with or.

Fixing Kafka’s 80% problem with a serious fully managed free Kafka.

Learn the key differences between Apache Kafka and Apache ActiveMQ — from messaging models to performance, scalability and use cases — and see how meshIQ improves observability across both platforms.

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.