AutoMQ

Use it when

• You run Kafka in the cloud and the bill, not the protocol, is the problem: diskless brokers over object storage remove replica storage and cross-zone traffic.
• Everything must stay Kafka-compatible; clients, Connect, and Streams work unchanged against its 100% Kafka API surface.
• You want elasticity without pain; brokers hold no persistent data, so partition reassignment takes seconds and scaling copies nothing.
• You want the option open source keeps: Apache-2.0 and self-hostable, unlike proprietary diskless rivals such as WarpStream.

Think twice when

• Your latency budget is tight; writing through object storage trades some end-to-end delay against local NVMe Kafka.
• You run on-premises without an S3-class store; the design assumes cloud object storage underneath.
• The deployment is small and stable; plain Kafka or Redpanda may be simpler than adopting a younger rebuild.

How it runs

Kafka brokers and KRaft controllers rebuilt over object storage with a write-ahead log in front; brokers keep no persistent local data. Self-host it free under Apache-2.0, or use AutoMQ Cloud billed through cloud marketplaces. Table Topic can write Iceberg tables directly from the stream.