Aiven for Kafka is a managed version of the Apache 2.0-licensed open source Kafka. Aiven handles all the operational overhead of running a Kafka cluster, including server provisioning, patching, high-availability, backups, and security. Allowing you to focus on building your application, rather than on managing infrastructure.
Aiven has also made improvements to Kafka, such as through KIP-1150, which means Kafka can now write data directly to object storage, like AWS S3, using a leaderless architecture where any broker can handle any partition.
This eliminates expensive local disk replication for topic data, though brokers still leverage small amounts of disk for metadata.