Bufstream

Guarantee data quality and store directly to Apache Iceberg™ tables with Bufstream, a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka^®.

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Schema-first, Kafka-compatible streaming data platform

Bufstream is a fully self-hosted alternative to Apache Kafka that ensures data quality with industry-leading validation. It reduces cloud costs by writing data to object storage and is 100% compatible with the Kafka protocol, including support for exactly-once semantics (EOS) and transactions.

Guaranteed data quality

Prevents bad data from entering your topics in the first place.

Direct to Iceberg

Natively writes data as Iceberg tables. No ETL, zero copies.

Field-level RBAC

Only the right people see the right data.

8x lower cloud costs

Bufstream stores data to object storage.

Things you can do with Bufstream

Bufstream understands the shape of the data traversing its topics. Its broker-side schema awareness brings several uniquely valuable capabilities – foremost among them is blocking bad data from entering topics in the first place.

Semantic Validation

Bufstream is unique in that it validates not only the schema ID and shape of the data, it also validates that the data meet your business rules and domain logic, eliminating an entire class of data errors before they materialize in downstream systems.

Simplicity

Bufstream is as simple to deploy and maintain as a web app, autoscaling from 0 to 100 GiB/s of writes with no operator intervention. Under the hood, Bufstream is just a simple binary, keeping local development simple.

Apache Iceberg Integration

Bufstream writes topic data directly to Apache Iceberg tables, persisting records to Iceberg tables as they are received. Your topic data is immediately ready for consumption by your compute engine of choice. No ETL pipelines, no data copies, faster time-to-insight.

Active-Active

Bufstream's leaderless architecture means clients can write to any broker in any availability zone, reducing cross-zone networking costs. On GCP clusters, brokers can even span regions without significantly affecting cost."

Reliability

Bufstream leaves nothing to chance. Rather than reinventing wheels, it's built on ubiquitous cloud primitives: object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure) and an off-the-shelf metadata storage (Postgres, Google Cloud Spanner, or etcd).

Jepsen Verified for Correctness

Bufstream is the only object-storage-based Kafka replacement independently verified for correctness by Jepsen. We invest heavily in correctness testing; no message queue deployed in production should be left to chance.

The source of truth for tracking and evolving Protobuf APIs

Guaranteed data quality

Bufstream eliminates bad data at the source: rather than hoping that every producer will opt into validation, Bufstream brokers work with the Buf Schema Registry to enforce quality controls for all topics with Protobuf schemas. Bad data is immediately rejected, so consumers can trust that the data they receive will always match the appropriate schema and adhere to any semantic constraints.

Apache Iceberg™as your Kafka storage layer

Bufstream natively writes your data to S3-compatible object storage as Iceberg tables with zero copies. Eliminate the need for a costly ETL pipeline and start querying your data in seconds.

8x lower cloud costs

Bufstream replaces traditional disks with object storage, the most reliable and cost-effective cloud storage primitive. By eliminating expensive network-attached volumes and delegating cross-zone data replication to object storage Bufstream reduces cloud costs 8x compared to Apache Kafka — while remaining fully compatible with Kafka clients, connectors, and tools.

Fully air-gapped deployment

Your data is your most valuable, sensitive asset — you should own it. Bufstream runs fully within your AWS or GCP VPC, without any dependencies on external services.

Field-level RBAC

With Bufstream, you can enforce fine-grained access controls at the field level, ensuring that only the right people see the right data.

Get started with Bufstream

Get started in minutes with our Bufstream Quickstart or start a conversation with one of our Protobuf experts.

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