URSA - Leaderless & Stateless Kafka Streaming at 95% Lower Cost - StreamNative

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URSA: The Lakehouse-Native Data Streaming Engine for Apache Kafka

Stream, store, and scale with effortless compatibility and cost efficiency—up to 10× lower cost vs. Kafka, plus zero-copy streaming into your lakehouse.

Ursa Engine

What's new

Introduce Ursa Storage Extension

Introduce Ursa Storage Extension—add lakehouse storage to Classic Pulsar clusters, stream once into open lakehouse tables, lower TCO, and keep an upgrade path to Ursa.

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Ursa Awarded VLBD 2025 "Best Industry Paper"

Ursa wins the VLDB 2025 Best Industry Paper for introducing the first lakehouse-native streaming engine for Kafka. Discover how Ursa delivers 10× cost savings, leaderless architecture, and seamless Kafka compatibility by writing directly to Iceberg and Delta Lake.

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Run 5GB/s of Kafka workloads for $50 per hour

Ursa, the data streaming engine powering StreamNative’s managed Kafka service, can sustain 5GB/s Kafka workloads at just 5% of the cost of traditional streaming engines like Redpanda.

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Accelerate Your Streaming Data and AI with StreamNative Ursa

Ursa unifies streaming and lakehouse capabilities to deliver unmatched cost savings, massive scalability, and rock-solid reliability for your real-time streaming and AI workloads—without rewriting a single line of code.

100% Kafka Compatible

Seamlessly supports Kafka, Pulsar, MQTT, and more. No code changes for producers or consumers

Cheaper Than Kafka

Minimize costs with leaderless architecture and efficient resource usage.

Lakehouse-Native Streaming

Efficiently store data in open table formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.

Ursa Awarded Best Industry Paper

Read our award-winning paper on Ursa—the first lakehouse-native, leaderless data streaming engine for Kafka—designed for elasticity, reliability, and lower costs.

Focus on Using Data, Not Managing Infrastructure

Skip the hassle of traditional data streaming and let Ursa do the heavy lifting. Here are 5 big "NO" items you avoid with Ursa:

No Inter-AZ Data Transfer

No inter-AZ data transfer.

Minimal overhead, simpler networking.

No inter-AZ client-to-broker communication.

Reduced latency and cross-region data transfer.

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Compute and storage decoupled. Scale each independently.

No overprovisioning. Pay only for what you use.

Auto-scaling on demand.

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Open table formats

(e.g., Iceberg, Delta)

Zero-copy streaming

from Kafka to Lakehouse

Effortless topic-to-table conversion.

Unify streaming and batch with a single copy of data.

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Access the same data as a Kafka topic and a Lakehouse table

Eliminates complex ETL steps

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Discover the benefits of URSA, a Kafka API-compatible data streaming engine built on the lakehouse. Get insights on optimizing your data streaming with URSA!

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What Ursa Means for Your Business

Confidently modernize your streaming data infrastructure:

Explore how Ursa can reduce your total cost of ownership while boosting performance.

Additional Resources

Dive deeper into Ursa with helpful guides and success stories:

September 25, 2025

10 min read

Ursa Everywhere: Paving the Path to a Lakehouse-Native Future for Data Streaming

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September 2, 2025

6 min read

Ursa Wins VLDB 2025 Best Industry Paper: The First Lakehouse-Native Streaming Engine for Kafka

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StreamNative Ursa Is Now Available for Public Preview on Microsoft Azure

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10x

Lower cloud spend

What People Say About Ursa

“As a longtime StreamNative customer running its classic Apache Pulsar™ engine for ultra-low-latency workloads, I couldn't be more excited about the new Ursa Engine GA. It opens up entirely new possibilities for data-intensive, latency-relaxed workloads—all while simplifying our enterprise data architecture. You don't have to worry about cost anymore—just pump all your streaming data into Ursa.

Christos A.

Enterprise Architect at a Fortune 500 Automotive Company

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Upgrade Your Kafka to StreamNative Ursa


A Truly Lakehouse-Native Engine

Cut infrastructure costs, reduce operational overhead, and unify streaming with your Lakehouse. Experience the next evolution in data streaming.

Deploy in minutes. Pay as you go. Available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.