Kora: The Cloud Native Engine for Apache Kafka

This post introduces Kora, Confluent's cloud-native engine for Apache Kafka, detailing its architecture and benefits. Kora is designed from the ground up for cloud constraints, focusing on multi-tenancy, disaggregation of compute, network, metadata, and storage layers, intelligent data locality management (memory, SSD, object storage), performance optimization for cloud environments, real-time usage capture for operations, and cost optimization. It enables elastic scaling (30x faster), higher availability (99.99% SLA), and lower latency compared to self-managed Kafka. The post also touches on continuous improvements through multi-phase fleet updates and advanced data balancing algorithms.