Apache Kafka®
Kafka done right.
Take provisioning, patching, failover, backups, and security off your plate, so you run Apache Kafka without running a Kafka team. It's the Kafka you already know and love, with up to 80% lower TCO.
99.99% SLA
50+ connectors
Runs on any cloud
Aiven for Kafka is upstream Apache Kafka, minus the ops work. Storage and compute scale independently, so you can add brokers without paying for disk you don't need.
Aiven handles provisioning, patching, high availability, backups, and security. Your engineers ship features instead of babysitting brokers.
Run sub-100ms streams and cheaper diskless topics in the same cluster, instead of splitting hot and cold data across separate clusters.
Keep every client, connector, and tool. Just upgrade and go! It’s upstream-aligned, fully open source, and offers zero lock-in.
A leaderless architecture writes straight to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud, cutting cross-AZ fees and local disk costs.
Case study
From startup to global scale
Powering mission-critical event streaming for top engineering teams
Case Study
If Kafka Is Down, Everything Is Down | Wolt + Aiven
Wolt's VP of Engineering shares why Apache Kafka® sits at the heart of their platform, what seven years of partnership with Aiven looks like in practice, and how they're building the data foundation needed to get AI working at scale.
Why Aiven?
We’ve got your back
Our managed service makes it easy for you to build event-driven capabilities and applications, with predictable billing and backed by our 99.99% uptime SLA.
Infinite scalability with tiered storage
From real-time analytics to historical insights, build apps that handle it all. Aiven for Kafka scales compute and storage independently with tiered storage.
Built-in Schema Registry with Karapace
Ensure data integrity and prevent breaking changes with our open-source, Karapace-powered Schema Registry. It's fully integrated and managed for you.
Predictive consumer lag monitoring
Get ahead of bottlenecks. Our platform provides insights to help you identify consumer lag issues early, crucial for auto-scaling consumers and ensuring smooth data flow.
Automatic failure recovery
Self-healing clusters with automatic node recovery ensure your services stay online, and we run multi-node clusters across availability zones to guarantee our 99.99% uptime SLA.
Follower fetcher
Reduce network traffic, lower latency, and improve resource utilization by allowing consumers to read data from replica brokers instead of only the leader broker.
pricing
Try Aiven for Kafka for free
Scale without hidden costs
Free
A playground for test streams and proofs of concept
Developer
For personal projects, staging and test environments
Startup
For test environments with high performance needs
Starting from
$200/month
Business
For business-critical production and larger test environments
Starting from
$500/monthPerformance characteristics
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Max seen in production | Production limits (tested) | Production limits (future) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Data In | 1.8 GB/sec | 10 GB/sec | Unlimited |
P99 Diskless Latency | 1500ms | 2000ms | 800ms |
Partitions | 68,000 | 154,000 | Unlimited |
Connections | 120,000 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Connectors
A unified platform for your entire data stack
Connect services with a single click. Move data effortlessly between managed databases and streaming services to build powerful, integrated applications.
Aiven in action
From zero to first message in 2 minutes
See how fast you can deploy a fully-managed Kafka cluster, produce your first message, and consume it in real time.
Frequently asked questions
Apache Kafka® is an open source distributed real-time streaming product that powers event-driven architectures and high-performance data pipelines:
- Proven performance: Kafka is trusted by a large proportion of the world’s largest and most demanding companies, across practically every major sector.
- Valuable versatility: From its origins as a real-time user activity pipeline, Kafka has grown into a key enabler of messaging, metrics, log aggregation, stream processing, event sourcing and more.
Easy integration: Kafka integrates with a long list of event sources and event sinks such as Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, and AWS S3
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.
The most common use cases are messaging, website activity tracking, operational monitoring, log aggregation, stream processing, event sourcing, and commit logging. These applications generally leverage more foundational or abstract use cases including:
- Streaming directly into data lake: Stream data directly into Iceberg tables and query it instantly, bringing database-like functionality to your data lake.
- Event-driven microservices: Decouple your services and enable resilient, scalable communication. Use Kafka as the central nervous system for your microservices architecture, allowing teams to build and deploy independently. Prototype your first microservice on the Developer Tier from $35/mo.
- Log & metrics aggregation: Create a unified, scalable observability pipeline. Ship logs and metrics from all your systems into a central Kafka cluster, then sink them into Aiven for OpenSearch® for powerful search, analysis, and visualization.
- Change Data Capture (CDC): Stream every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE from your operational databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL into Kafka topics using our managed Debezium connector. Unlock the value of your operational data without impacting source systems.
Yes, we’ve taken great care to equip you with features that make it easier to develop applications with Kafka, including:
- Streamlined topic ownership: Enable application teams to request and own their Kafka topics directly, with built-in approval workflows that ensure governance without bottlenecks.
- Topic catalog for discovery: Our comprehensive topic catalog makes it easy for teams across your organization to discover and reuse existing data streams, preventing duplication and increasing data reuse.
- Quality-first data streams, every time: Our integrated Schema Registry automatically enforces data quality and consistency, preventing breaking changes and simplifying data evolution.
Data flow visualizer: Visually map your data flow across Aiven services and easily expand your pipelines.
Aiven offers standard Kafka security to connect using mTLS and/or SASL authentication with authorisation using ACLs.
Data at rest is always encrypted whether that be on disk or object storage.
There is also the option to enhance your security setup with Aiven's permission system offering a less cumbersome experience than ACLs.
We don't just run Kafka, we help build it. Our team includes dedicated Apache Kafka® open-source committers, ensuring deep expertise and a direct contribution to its evolution.
STOP MANAGING, START BUILDING