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Kafka and Iceberg is a costly marriage of inconvenience. If you write code for a living you’ve probably heard of Apache Iceberg - but you might not realise the detour your Kafka events must take to get there. Typically a Kafka message written to an Iceberg table must take a journey via a connector, rack up transfer fees, and idle in a sidecar before it appears as an Iceberg table—hardly the friction‑free flow open table formats promise.

TLDR; Aiven Stream Governance is our developer-centric approach to making trustworthy data the free and default experience, not a costly add-on. The cost? Nada. Because credible streaming is a right not a privilege.

In the cloud, Kafka’s promise of “never lose a byte” quietly morphs into “always pay for two.” Every time the leader syncs followers across zones, you get hit with premium egress charges that can dwarf compute costs. Diskless Kafka turns that upside-down: brokers replicate data straight into S3, so the pricey cross-zone hops vanish. Yes, object storage is slower than a local SSD, but the swap buys you on-demand elasticity and a bill that finally makes sense.

We are proud to share that Aiven has been awarded the Top Tech Award in the “Transformation and Cloud” category by L’Informaticien, one of France’s leading IT publications. The honour comes as part of the 2025 Top Tech Awards, a celebration of standout achievements in digital innovation, transformation, and cloud excellence. This award is a major milestone.

Today is a special day at Aiven. We are incredibly proud and humbled to announce that we have officially surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. This is more than just a number on a dashboard. It’s a powerful milestone that reflects the trust of thousands of developers, the incredible innovation of our customers, and the relentless dedication of our global team—the Aiven crabs.

Diskless topics are proposed in KIP-1150, which is currently under community review. The examples in this article use "Inkless", Aiven's implementation of KIP-1150 that lets you run it in production. I joined Aiven as a Developer Advocate in May, shortly after the Kafka Improvement Proposal KIP-1150: Diskless Topics was announced, which reduces the total cost of ownership of Kafka by up to 80%!