SAN FRANCISCO, March 18, 2025 -- StreamNative, the cloud-native data streaming company, announced the General Availability (GA) of Ursa Engine for Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The engine integrates natively with Snowflake Open Catalog, Databricks Unity Catalog, and Amazon S3 Tables to stream real-time data into AI-ready data lakehouses.
Alongside this announcement, StreamNative introduced UniLink (Universal Linking) in public preview. This tool helps customers migrate from legacy data streaming platforms to Ursa. The company states these offerings reduce infrastructure costs, simplify Apache Kafka migrations, and unify governance across streaming and batch workloads.
Ursa Engine Architecture and Advantages
Ursa Engine employs a leaderless architecture that eliminates traditional Kafka inefficiencies. The system removes leader elections, reducing operational complexity and inter-availability zone traffic. By adopting lakehouse-native storage design, organizations can store data directly in object storage using Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake open table formats.
The engine achieves approximately tenfold cost reduction compared to traditional Kafka solutions. Data flows seamlessly to object storage, compacts automatically into Iceberg tables, and becomes immediately available for data teams using Snowflake.
Integration with Data Catalogs
Ursa Engine natively integrates with modern data catalogs including Snowflake Open Catalog, Databricks Unity Catalog, and AWS S3 Tables. This integration provides end-to-end data governance for both streaming and batch workloads, eliminating the need for custom integrations or connectors. Organizations achieve consistent security, access control, and lineage tracking.
UniLink Migration Tool
UniLink enables seamless Kafka topic and metadata replication to Ursa Engine without downtime. The tool converts Kafka topics directly into Iceberg or Delta tables, ensuring full compatibility with modern data lakehouses while significantly reducing operational costs.
"As a longtime StreamNative customer running its classic Apache Pulsar engine in production for our 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. Our evaluation shows it to be 10 times more cost-efficient than other Kafka solutions. Everything is seamlessly written to object storage, automatically compacted into Iceberg tables, and made immediately available for our data teams using Snowflake. Ursa Engine delivers the performance, cost-efficiency, and scalability we need to stay ahead in our industry." -- Christos A, Enterprise Architect at F500 company
"Real-time data ingestion is a critical component of modern AI and analytics. Ursa Engine's integration with Snowflake Open Catalog and Apache Iceberg will allow businesses to stream data into their lakehouses more seamlessly, reducing costs while maintaining and prioritizing unified governance, interoperability, and performance. We're excited to see StreamNative bring this powerful solution to the market." -- Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake
"For too long, high costs have kept real-time data streaming out of reach for many organizations. With today's announcements and our catalog integrations, we're making data streaming more affordable, scalable, and AI-ready—without disrupting existing Kafka workloads." -- Sijie Guo, CEO & Co-Founder, StreamNative
Organizations can experience Ursa and explore StreamNative's solutions with a $200 credit at console.streamnative.cloud.
