Apache Kafka has come a long way from being just a scalable data ingestion layer for data lakes. Today, it is the backbone of real-time transactional applications. In many organizations, Kafka serves as the central nervous system connecting both operational and analytical workloads. Over time, its architecture has shifted significantly — from brokers managing all storage, to Tiered Storage, and now toward a new paradigm: Diskless Kafka.

Diskless Kafka refers to a Kafka architecture in which brokers use no local disk storage. Instead, all event data is stored directly in cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage.