Name: WarpStream
Brand: WarpStream
Availability: InStock

Go Diskless With WarpStream

Diskless Kafka skips local broker disks entirely. Producers write straight into cloud object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) through stateless agents. No leaders. No partition rebalancing. No cross-AZ replication fees. The object store handles durability behind the scenes, and compute is free to scale up, down, or to zero.

Simpler, Cheaper, Zero Disks

What Is Diskless Kafka?

Kafka was built for 2011 data centers, where cross-machine networking was free and local disks were cheap. Cloud flipped both assumptions.

Switch

Pricing

"The sort of stuff we put our WarpStream cluster through wasn't even an option with our previous solution. It kept crashing due to the scale of our data, specifically the amount of data we wanted to store. WarpStream just worked."

Jeffrey Ling, CTO

Traditional Kafka clusters write data to local SSDs on each broker, then replicate that data to follower brokers sitting in different availability zones. This made perfect sense when LinkedIn designed Kafka for their own data centers.

Cloud environments are a different story. That cross-zone replication racks up massive networking bills. At scale, 70–90% of a Kafka cluster’s infrastructure cost is just moving bytes between availability zones.

Diskless Kafka skips all of that. Instead of writing to local disks, data goes directly into cloud object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage). The compute layer becomes fully stateless. No disks to manage, no partitions to rebalance, no brokers to babysit. The object store handles durability and replication behind the scenes.

The result: a system that costs a fraction of what Kafka costs, runs with near-zero operational overhead, and scales without limits.

Inter-AZ Networking Tax

$136K/mo Wasted Moving Bytes

Every GiB that crosses an availability zone boundary costs ~$0.02 on AWS. Kafka replicates every write across zones, and the producer itself often writes cross-zone. At 1 GiB/s sustained throughput, that adds up to roughly $136,000 per month in networking alone.

Triple-Replicated Disks

18× More Expensive Than S3

Kafka triple-replicates data on EBS or local NVMe — roughly $0.39/GiB/month. S3 costs $0.021/GiB/month. That's an 18× difference that compounds at petabyte scale.

Stateful Brokers

Constant Operational Pain

Disk failures, partition rebalancing, broker decommissioning, capacity planning, volume resizing. All of it requires deep expertise, custom tooling, and (usually) a dedicated team.

Architecture

How It Works

Stateless agents replace Kafka brokers. Every agent can serve every partition. There are no leaders, no followers, no rebalancing.

Read the Docs

"You don't have to worry about storage and compute. It's data go in, data go out. WarpStream is exactly the abstraction that you want out of Kafka. You pay somebody a small amount of money, you get to keep your data. It just scales up and you don't think about it. I think we've spent zero hours thinking about scaling WarpStream in the last few months."

Alex Haugland, Software Engineer

Zero-ops streaming for AI telemetry and model pipelines. Cursor needed real-time data for their AI-powered IDE without running additional infrastructure. WarpStream gave them Kafka-compatibility, full data ownership in S3, and no ops overhead.

Cut TCO by 90% while scaling to 100 PiB+. Goldsky’s Kafka clusters couldn’t handle tens of thousands of partitions or petabyte-scale data. With WarpStream, they moved to object storage, eliminated broker crashes, and cut total cost of ownership by over 10×.

By switching from Kafka to WarpStream for their logging workloads, Robinhood saved 45%. WarpStream auto-scaling always keeps clusters right-sized, and features like Agent Groups eliminate issues like noisy neighbors and complex networking like PrivateLink and VPC peering.

7.5 GiB/s fan-out with no inter-AZ fees. Grafana’s metrics backend ran into multi-AZ replication costs and bottlenecks. WarpStream’s diskless architecture decoupled write/read paths, letting them stream at multi-GiB throughput with zero cross-AZ fees.

Deploy instantly

Get Started

WarpStream runs in your environment with a single command. Deploy the lightweight Agent in your cloud, point it at your bucket, and connect your Kafka clients — no broker setup, no tuning, no replication pain.

Get Started

Pricing

“Unlike trying to run Kafka locally, I ran the Agent demo and it just worked. It was so refreshing to have a Kafka-compatible API running out of the box.”

Brian Anglin, CTO

Ready in 60 30 seconds:

curl https://console.warpstream.com/install.sh | sh

Create your first virtual cluster,
point your clients, and you’re live.

Deploy the lightweight WarpStream Agent binary in your cloud account (Linux container/VM).
‍
Point it to your object-store bucket, connect your Kafka-compatible producers/consumers, and scale freely.

Data flows. You control it. WarpStream only manages control plane's metadata.

Orbit

effortless migration

Whether your Kafka source is self-hosted Kafka or a cloud provider, copy your data 1:1 to transition to WarpStream quickly and easily.

Explore Orbit

"Warpstream was super fast to implement. It got us away from the spiraling costs of MSK and we ended up with a much simpler architecture."

Kshitij Grover, Co-Founder and CTO

Zero Ops Kafka Migration

Run Orbit once (for migration) or continuously (for replication, disaster recovery, or tiered storage). Orbit uses a single, simple YAML file.

Built-in Observability

Once Orbit is running, get metrics and reporting on throughput, which topics are being mirrored and have finished migrating, and lag for topics currently in migration.

10x cheaper than kafka

Pricing & TCO

Get up to a 10× TCO reduction while scaling to tens of petabytes in object storage and managing thousands of partitions.

View Pricing Calculator

"[WarpStream] has no inter-AZ networking costs and no disks to manage, which means it [helped] us achieve all of our objectives for Grafana Cloud Metrics."

Zhehao Zhou, Senior Product Manager

Predictable, Transparent Pricing

You pay for:

You don't pay for:

Uncompressed bytes in
Cluster-minutes (processing time)
Object-storage used

Reads or partitions
Cross-AZ replication
Idle capacity

Use the Pricing Calculator

secure by default

Trusted & Enterprise Ready

SOC 2 Type II certified, backed by Confluent, and running in production at companies with hyper-scale demands.

View Trust Center

Built for Serious & Secure Workloads

WarpStream's unique architecture is built on a zero-access BYOC model that is secure by default, meaning raw data and compute remain entirely within your environment.

WarpStream personnel have no access to your data, ensuring the highest level of security and compliance for even the most sensitive workloads.

Make The Switch

Get started for free with no credit card and $400 in credits that never expire.

Get Started

Contact Sales

Not quite ready to switch? Bolt Tableflow on to ANY Kafka cluster in 5 seconds...
‍No migration required.

Get started through a cloud marketplace:

Google Cloud Marketplace

AWS Marketplace