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Inkless Kafka overview

Inkless is an Apache Kafka® service from Aiven for cloud deployments, supporting diskless topics and object storage-backed data retention.

Inkless is available on Aiven Cloud and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployments. It runs on Kafka 4.x and supports both classic and diskless topics within the same service. Classic Kafka remains available and can be selected when creating a new Kafka service.

Inkless remains compatible with standard Kafka APIs and clients.

Key differences from classic Kafka​

Inkless changes how Kafka services store and manage data:

  • Diskless topics: Opt-in diskless topics store all retained data in object storage.
  • Classic topics: Data storage and retention are managed automatically by the service.
  • Managed configuration: Some broker-level settings use managed defaults.
  • KRaft-based metadata management: Inkless uses KRaft for metadata and consensus, replacing ZooKeeper.
  • Kafka Connect deployment: Kafka Connect is deployed as a separate service.

Billing and cost​

Inkless uses object storage and network traffic differently from Classic Kafka.

  • Diskless topics store retained data directly in object storage.
  • Internal service components required for Inkless operation are fully managed by Aiven and are not billed separately.

Billing depends on the deployment model (Aiven Cloud or Bring Your Own Cloud), the selected service capacity, and actual storage and network usage.

When to use Inkless​

Use Inkless when you need to:

  • Scale storage without managing broker disk capacity.
  • Retain large volumes of data for extended periods.
  • Scale and recover clusters faster than fixed-storage deployments.
  • Combine classic and diskless topics in the same service.

Existing Classic Kafka services​

Existing Classic Kafka services continue to run unchanged.

Classic Kafka remains available for existing deployments and is visible in the Aiven Console only for projects that already include a Classic Kafka service.

Upgrading or migrating an existing Classic Kafka service to Inkless is not supported at this time. The cluster type is fixed at service creation. To use Inkless, create a Kafka service and select Inkless as the cluster type.

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