Free Tier Kafka Competition: The Winners

When we launched Aiven's Free Tier Kafka competition with a $5,000 prize pool, we wanted to see what the community could build. What we got back was incredible: genuine creativity, technical depth, and projects that are truly inspiring to the Apache Kafka community. 🤩

After reviewing all the submissions, we realized we could not have chosen just one winner. So we didn't; where some large old-school vendors double prices, we doubled the awards!

Congratulations to our two winners, who both receive $5,000!

• Yusuf Ganiyu: Chicken Invaders Kafka
  • A real-time multiplayer arcade game powered entirely by Apache Kafka. Yusuf used 5 Kafka topics to handle game state, player actions, spectator mode, and even replays. I mean: replays 💥. It is a technically impressive demonstration of how Kafka can power multiplayer experiences.
• Kuba Nowakowski: Kafka + Flink Delivery Notifications
  • Kuba built a parcel delivery notification system using Kafka and Apache Flink. This is the bread and butter of Kafka and a great example of where it thrives; you can get this done in minutes, head to the beach, and profit. And, for bonus points, if you are wondering how to combine Kafka with Flink, this is your blueprint.

Direct collaboration with the community

We loved how both of these projects showed a willingness to share the journey with the community.

But we also want to recognize a few other impressive projects. Jaime López built AIS Guardian, a maritime security system that processes 5,000 vessel signals per second using Kafka and Apache Flink to protect Baltic Sea infrastructure — it even detected the FITBURG vessel's suspicious behaviour before it severed the Finland-Estonia Elisa cable on New Year's Eve. Dan Cytermann created Chat Over Kafka, a Kafka-backed walkie-talkie app for Android that turns the messaging backbone into a real-time voice communication tool.

Ben Gamble built an IRC Kafka Relay combining Kafka with PostgreSQL and Valkey. Daniel De Burgo explored Kafka for IoT with a smart doorbell project. Naci Simsek built MyGameDay, a full-stack sports data platform combining Kafka, Flink, and ML for game day analytics. And Damian Bemben combined a £6.80 Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller with Kafka and generative AI to build a city planning tool in a single month, documenting the full journey from hardware prototyping to streaming integration.

We are not stopping here. We are refining our approach to community rewards and will start the Open Source Awards as a regular program - watch this space!

We are also going to launch a follow-up competition soon. This next phase will focus on PostgreSQL, but also everything else that Free Aiven has to offer (and some of the new free services we plan to release too 🤫). These competitions will become an integral part of how we support developers.

Thank you to everyone who participated. This was amazing, fun and just freaking awesome. Keep building.

Basically Kafka can protect critical infrastructure, aggregate sports results, accelerate city planning, amuse you in the way that only 1980s Atari could, play walkie-talkie (another 1980-feature) and run an IRC relay… Other than the fact that folks may have dated themselves a bit with these projects 😅, you’ve got to love Kafka. 🔥

Thanks team 🦀 🚀