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Ursa - a new Iceberg-first storage engine for Kafka
What’s been peculiarly interesting in this dogfight has been companies’ slow pivot away from their proprietary-solutions and heavier lean into open-source and the Kafka protocol.
The latest example is StreamNative. Traditionally the Apache Pulsar company3, they just released a blog post called “We are a Kafka Company, Too” where they detailed how they’ve chosen to fork a new version of Kafka (4.2) and add a new, opt-in diskless write/read path that utilizes their to-be-open-sourced Ursa storage engine. This fork also supports the classic Kafka write/read paths and API since it is literally Kafka.