How do you retrofit a clustered data-processing system to use cheap commodity storage? That’s the big question in this episode as we look at one of the many attempts to build a version of Kafka that uses object storage services like S3 as its main disk, sacrificing a little latency for cheap, infinitely-scalable disks.

There are several companies trying to walk down that road, and it’s clearly big business - one of them recently got bought out for a rumoured $250m. But one of them is actively trying to get those changes back into the community, as are pushing to make Apache Kafka speak object storage natively.

Joining me to explain why and how are Josep Prat and Filip Yonov of Aiven. We break down what it takes to make Kafka’s storage layer optional on a per-topic basis, how they’re making sure it’s not a breaking change, and how they plan to get such a foundational feature merged.

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Announcement Post: https://aiven.io/blog/guide-diskless-apache-kafka-kip-1150

Aiven’s (Temporary) Fork, Project Inkless: https://github.com/aiven/inkless/blob/main/docs/inkless/README.md

Kafka Improvement Process (KIP) Articles:

KIP-1150: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1150%3A+Diskless+Topics
KIP-1163: Diskless Core: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1163%3A+Diskless+Core
KIP-1164: Topic Based Batch Coordinator: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1164%3A+Topic+Based+Batch+Coordinator
KIP-1165: Object Compaction for Diskless: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1165%3A+Object+Compaction+for+Diskless

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Filip on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipyonov

Josep on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlprat/

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Episode 61: Steve Elkington