URSA: The Lakehouse-Native Data Streaming Engine for Apache Kafka
Stream, store, and scale with effortless compatibility and cost efficiency—up to 10× lower cost vs. Kafka, plus zero-copy streaming into your lakehouse.
.svg)
What's new
Ursa Awarded VLBD 2025 "Best Industry Paper"
Ursa wins the VLDB 2025 Best Industry Paper for introducing the first lakehouse-native streaming engine for Kafka. Discover how Ursa delivers 10× cost savings, leaderless architecture, and seamless Kafka compatibility by writing directly to Iceberg and Delta Lake.
Run 5GB/s of Kafka workloads for $50 per hour
Ursa, the data streaming engine powering StreamNative’s managed Kafka service, can sustain 5GB/s Kafka workloads at just 5% of the cost of traditional streaming engines like Redpanda.
Webinar: Streaming to Iceberg with Unity Catalog
Learn how StreamNative + Databricks enable native streaming into Unity Catalog–managed Iceberg tables via the Iceberg REST protocol—governed, validated, and AI-ready.
Accelerate Your Streaming Data and AI with StreamNative Ursa
Ursa unifies streaming and lakehouse capabilities to deliver unmatched cost savings, massive scalability, and rock-solid reliability for your real-time streaming and AI workloads—without rewriting a single line of code.
100% Kafka Compatible
Seamlessly supports Kafka, Pulsar, MQTT, and more. No code changes for producers or consumers
Cheaper Than Kafka
Minimize costs with leaderless architecture and efficient resource usage.
Lakehouse-Native Streaming
Efficiently store data in open table formats like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.
Ursa Awarded Best Industry Paper
Read our award-winning paper on Ursa—the first lakehouse-native, leaderless data streaming engine for Kafka—designed for elasticity, reliability, and lower costs.
Focus on Using Data, Not Managing Infrastructure
Skip the hassle of traditional data streaming and let Ursa do the heavy lifting. Here are 5 big "NO" items you avoid with Ursa:
No Inter-AZ Data Transfer
No Disks to Manage
No Overprovisioning
No Connectors
No Data Duplication
The Hidden Costs of Kafka
Learn more →
Leaderless Architecture
Eliminates cross-AZ replication and leader elections—cutting network spend while improving resilience and recovery.
Stateless Brokers
Scale compute independently of storage, avoiding overprovisioning so you pay only for the throughput you use.
Lakehouse-Native Storage
Writes directly to object storage in open table formats, delivering durable performance at a fraction of disk cost.
Stream-Table Duality
Zero-copy streams to Iceberg/Delta reduce connectors and ETL, simplifying pipelines and lowering latency and cost.
No inter-AZ data transfer.
Minimal overhead, simpler networking.
No inter-AZ client-to-broker communication.
Reduced latency and cross-region data transfer.
Compute and storage decoupled.
Scale each independently.
No overprovisioning.
Pay only for what you use.
Auto-scaling
on demand.
Open table formats
(e.g., Iceberg, Delta)
Zero-copy streaming
from Kafka to Lakehouse
Effortless topic-to-table conversion.
Unify streaming and batch with a single copy of data.
Discover the benefits of URSA, a Kafka API-compatible data streaming engine built on the lakehouse. Get insights on optimizing your data streaming with URSA!
Learn More
What Ursa Means for Your Business
Confidently modernize your streaming data infrastructure:
Explore how Ursa can reduce your total cost of ownership while boosting performance.
Additional Resources
Dive deeper into Ursa with helpful guides and success stories:
.png)
10x
Lower cloud spend
What People Say About Ursa
“As a longtime StreamNative customer running its classic Apache Pulsar™ engine for 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.
Christos A.
Enterprise Architect at a Fortune 500 Automotive Company
Upgrade Your Kafka to StreamNative Ursa
A Truly Lakehouse-Native Engine
Cut infrastructure costs, reduce operational overhead, and unify streaming with your Lakehouse. Experience the next evolution in data streaming.
Deploy in minutes. Pay as you go. Available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Deploy in minutes. Pay as you go. Available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.