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Understanding Apache Kafka Performance: Diskless Topics Deep Dive

Diskless topics reward high-throughput workloads with large batches but can struggle with low-throughput patterns. Note: This analysis is based on testing with Diskless Kafka 4.0.0-rc15. Diskless topics are available for you to start experimenting with via the Inkless fork but the feature is still in development, and performance characteristics may change significantly as the technology matures. If you're: This post is for you!

Why don't Kafka and Iceberg get along?

Kafka and Iceberg is a costly marriage of inconvenience. If you write code for a living you’ve probably heard of Apache Iceberg - but you might not realise the detour your Kafka events must take to get there. Typically a Kafka message written to an Iceberg table must take a journey via a connector, rack up transfer fees, and idle in a sidecar before it appears as an Iceberg table—hardly the friction‑free flow open table formats promise.

Friends Don't Let Friends Deploy Kafka the Old Way

In the cloud, Kafka’s promise of “never lose a byte” quietly morphs into “always pay for two.” Every time the leader syncs followers across zones, you get hit with premium egress charges that can dwarf compute costs. Diskless Kafka turns that upside-down: brokers replicate data straight into S3, so the pricey cross-zone hops vanish. Yes, object storage is slower than a local SSD, but the swap buys you on-demand elasticity and a bill that finally makes sense.

Celebrating our Top Tech Award win with Back Market

We are proud to share that Aiven has been awarded the Top Tech Award in the “Transformation and Cloud” category by L’Informaticien, one of France’s leading IT publications. The honour comes as part of the 2025 Top Tech Awards, a celebration of standout achievements in digital innovation, transformation, and cloud excellence. This award is a major milestone.

Aiven Surpasses $100M ARR: A Story of Community, Open Source, and What's Next

Today is a special day at Aiven. We are incredibly proud and humbled to announce that we have officially surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. This is more than just a number on a dashboard. It’s a powerful milestone that reflects the trust of thousands of developers, the incredible innovation of our customers, and the relentless dedication of our global team—the Aiven crabs.

Your ClickHouse, optimized: Experience more flexible, price-performant plans

At Aiven, we're constantly striving to provide our users with the most efficient, powerful, and cost-effective solutions for their data needs. That's why we're thrilled to announce the launch of significantly enhanced plans for Aiven for ClickHouse across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Today, we are launching new plan options within our startup and business tiers as well as the ability to fine-tune local storage independently.

Getting Started with Diskless Kafka: A Beginner's Guide

Diskless topics are proposed in KIP-1150, which is currently under community review. The examples in this article use "Inkless", Aiven's implementation of KIP-1150 that lets you run it in production. I joined Aiven as a Developer Advocate in May, shortly after the Kafka Improvement Proposal KIP-1150: Diskless Topics was announced, which reduces the total cost of ownership of Kafka by up to 80%!

Benchmarking Hyperscalers: Aiven for ClickHouse Delivers More for Less

Aiven is proud to introduce our new pricing plans for Aiven for ClickHouse! Depending on your chosen region and plan, you can now double your compute power for the same price. On the other hand, if reducing costs is your priority, it's now possible to lower your total cost by up to 30% for the same compute power, depending on how you use the service. But how did we achieve this? This article explains how, and why Aiven’s nodes are the best for your ClickHouse workloads.

The 3 Es of Diskless Kafka BYOC

Diskless Kafka splits storage from compute, delegating replication to cheap object storage and turning Apache Kafka Brokers into a stateless compute layer. It’s 100% Kafka, and 80% cheaper. But in the cloud, a cheaper underlying technology does not always mean you pay less. The cost varies significantly depending on the deployment model - SaaS or BYOC. In this article, we will learn why.