SAN FRANCISCO, May 14, 2024 -- StreamNative, the cloud-native data streaming company founded by the original creators of Apache Pulsar, today launched Ursa, a Kafka-compatible data streaming engine built on top of lakehouse storage. Ursa is advancing Apache Pulsar with added functionality in public and private cloud environments to take data streaming to its next-generation.
Although cloud computing reduced operational cost in the last decade, there has been increased cost in infrastructure, especially networking. For technologies like data streaming and analytics where networking costs roughly 80% of entire IT spend, optimizing networking became a primary concern for many companies. Additionally, most cloud vendors charge high fees for egress traffic which makes it harder to aggregate data from multiple sources. These compounding factors drove the emergence of the "lakehouse" paradigm for unified batch and streaming data destinations. Data streaming capabilities must continue advancing to meet modern demands for building real-time analytics on large-scale cloud data platforms.
Ursa leverages Apache Pulsar's architectural principles and benefits, such as separate compute from storage, a rebalance-free architectural design, and cloud-first storage. Yet, Ursa has three significant updates:
Kafka API Compatibility
Ursa is completely compatible with Kafka API. This allows users to migrate to StreamNative without rewriting applications and continue to use the entire Kafka ecosystem out-of-the-box.
A Departure from ZooKeeper and BookKeeper
Users no longer have to manage ZooKeeper and have the ability to opt out BookKeeper for cost optimized workloads, enabling easier deployments in modern containerized environments, such as Kubernetes. Ursa leverages commodity object storage for cost-effective data replication, eliminating the excessive inter-AZ traffic traditionally seen in other data streaming technologies.
Lakehouse First
Lakehouse is the destination of all the analytical data, and streaming data will eventually land in a lakehouse. With the Ursa engine, data can be made immediately available in lakehouse formats, eliminating the complex and costly data movement between Pulsar, Kafka and your lakehouse. This allows for faster and cost-effective data processing and analysis with other tools, in addition to no longer needing data tiering between different storage systems. The use of lakehouse storage formats such as Delta Lake, Apache Hudi and Apache Iceberg for long term retention keeps costs to a minimum.
"We are thrilled to see StreamNative adopt the Delta Lake format in lakehouse storage, a commitment to forward-thinking data management. Delta Lake's popularity reflects robust capabilities, and this integration signifies significant advancement for users." -- Himanshu Raja, Director of Product Management at Databricks
"When we founded StreamNative, our vision was to provide truly modern cloud data streaming, leveraging architectural benefits from Apache Pulsar. With Ursa, we've advanced the core engine across dimensions, representing major progress toward our mission of creating the premier cloud-native platform." -- Sijie Guo, Co-founder & CEO at StreamNative
Pulsar Virtual Summit Europe 2024
Today's announcement is made in tandem with the Pulsar Virtual Summit Europe 2024, an event dedicated to Apache Pulsar and the messaging and event streaming community. The conference gathers an international audience of CTOs, CIOs, developers, data architects, data scientists, Apache Pulsar committers and contributors, and the data streaming community, to share experiences, exchange ideas and knowledge.
Prior Pulsar Summit events have featured 200+ interactive sessions by tech leads, open-source developers, software engineers, and software architects from Cisco, Salesforce, Splunk, Verizon Media, Iterable, Yahoo! JAPAN, TIBCO, Intuit, and more. The conferences have garnered 3,000+ attendees around the globe, including attendees from top tech, fintech and media companies, such as AWS, Google, Uber, Microsoft, AMEX, Salesforce, Disney, and Paypal.
