DEVOPSdigest

StreamNative launched Ursa, a Kafka-compatible data streaming engine built on top of lakehouse storage.

Ursa is advancing Apache Pulsar with added functionality in public and private cloud environments to take data streaming to its next-generation.

Ursa leverages Apache Pulsar's architectural principles and benefits, such as separate compute from storage, a rebalance-free architectural design, and cloud-first storage. Yet, Ursa has three significant updates:

- Kafka API Compatibility. Ursa is completely compatible with Kafka API. This allows users to migrate to StreamNative without rewriting applications and continue to use the entire Kafka ecosystem out-of-the box.

- A Departure from ZooKeeper and BookKeeper. Users no longer have to manage Zookeeper and have the ability to opt out Bookkeeper for cost optimized workloads, enabling easier deployments in modern containerized environments, such as Kubernetes. Ursa leverages commodity object storage for cost-effective data replication, eliminating the excessive inter-AZ traffic traditionally seen in other data streaming technologies.

- Lakehouse First. Lakehouse is the destination of all the analytical data, and streaming data will eventually land in a lakehouse. With the Ursa engine, data can be made immediately available in lakehouse formats, eliminating the complex and costly data movement between Pulsar,

- Kafka and your lakehouse. This allows for faster and cost-effective data processing and analysis with other tools, in addition to no longer needing data tiering between different storage systems. The use of lakehouse storage formats such as Delta Lake, Apache Hudi and Apache Iceberg for long term retention keeps costs to a minimum.

"When we founded StreamNative, our vision was to provide a truly modern data streaming service in the cloud, leveraging the architectural benefits pioneered in open-source, Apache Pulsar. While our initial cloud offering based on Pulsar was an industry leader, we recognized that realizing our vision of a streaming data cloud required rethinking system architecture, operations, and the user experience from the ground up for the cost conscious time," said Sijie Guo, Co-founder & CEO at StreamNative. "With Ursa, we've advanced Pulsar's core data streaming engine across several dimensions, representing a major step toward fulfilling StreamNative's mission of creating the world's premier cloud-native data streaming platform."

The URSA engine is available through ONE StreamNative Platform now.