TL;DR

Interzone traffic fees significantly inflate cloud infrastructure costs in data streaming systems. Ursa, a leaderless streaming platform built on S3, reduces these costs by minimizing interzone data transfers through innovative architecture and network optimization. This approach enhances system efficiency and optimizes cloud expenditure.

Opening

Imagine a world where your cloud infrastructure costs are slashed significantly, simply by rethinking how data moves across zones. Interzone traffic fees have long been a financial thorn for enterprises deploying large-scale streaming platforms like Kafka and Pulsar. However, with Ursa, a revolutionary Kafka-compatible, leaderless streaming platform, these costs can be minimized, allowing businesses to allocate resources more strategically and efficiently.

What You'll Learn (Key Takeaways)

• Architecture Innovation – Ursa employs a leaderless architecture with cloud storage integration, eliminating the need for traditional broker replication, thereby reducing interzone traffic fees.
• Network Optimization – By deploying dedicated load balancers for each zone and utilizing AWS's zonal endpoints, Ursa minimizes traffic between zones effectively.
• Simplified Data Ingestion – Ursa's lake house native engine allows direct data ingestion from topics to lake house tables, eliminating the need for additional connectors and reducing configuration complexity.

Q&A Highlights

Q: Do we have any estimation about the saving in traffic?
A: Using VPC flow logs, it's observed that almost all interzone traffic is eliminated, with minimal traffic generated for metadata operations.

Q: How does metadata traffic impact the system?
A: Metadata traffic is minimal and does not significantly impact overall system performance, even at high data throughput levels.

Q: Is there a single load balancer solution for multiple zones?
A: Yes, AWS's network load balancer provides zonal endpoints, allowing a single load balancer to achieve the same effect as multiple zonal solutions.