We're thrilled to announce that AutoMQ and Aklivity are joining forces to advance cloud-native real-time data infrastructure—helping enterprises unlock more value from their real-time data.
As digital transformation accelerates, real-time data has become the backbone of business innovation and competitiveness. Traditional real-time data architectures, however, often face challenges in connecting diverse systems, ensuring data security, and managing costs. These challenges make it difficult to support diverse, high-growth workloads across multiple protocols and environments.
To address these challenges, AutoMQ's stateless, cloud-native Kafka platform is now integrated with Aklivity's multi-protocol gateway technology. Together, they enable a unified, secure, and cost-effective real-time data platform that is efficient, scalable, and fully compatible with the Kafka ecosystem.
This strategic partnership combines AutoMQ's expertise in building cost-effective, elastic Kafka solutions with Aklivity's leadership in multi-protocol gateway technology, empowering enterprises to easily connect diverse systems and build next-generation applications that drive business growth.
About AutoMQ
AutoMQ is the only low-latency, diskless Kafka platform on the market that runs natively on cloud object storage (Amazon S3). Designed to fundamentally address the chronic issues of Apache Kafka in the cloud era—high cost, limited elasticity, and operational complexity—AutoMQ completely re-architects the storage layer while preserving 100% compatibility with the Kafka protocol.
By adopting a shared-storage architecture that fully decouples compute from storage, AutoMQ transforms Kafka brokers into stateless compute nodes. This design allows enterprises to leverage the durability and cost-efficiency of object storage without sacrificing performance, supporting deployment models including a secure "Bring Your Own Cloud" (BYOC) environment and self-managed software options.
100% Kafka Compatibility
A true drop-in replacement that maintains binary-level compatibility with Apache Kafka®. It supports the entire ecosystem (Connect, Strimzi, etc.) without code changes, ensuring a seamless migration with zero vendor lock-in.
Low Latency on S3
Combines the unlimited scalability of object storage with the performance of block storage. Through a unique offloaded WAL (Write-Ahead Log) mechanism, AutoMQ achieves single-digit millisecond write latency (P99 < 10ms) while persisting data directly to S3.
Elasticity at Cloud Speed
Adopts a diskless, stateless architecture that decouples compute from storage. AutoMQ scales brokers in seconds—not hours—significantly reducing the operational burden of partition rebalancing and enabling instant response to traffic spikes.
10x Cost Reduction
Redefines Kafka TCO by using S3 as the primary storage and eliminating expensive Cross-AZ data transfer fees. Its stateless design allows aggressive use of Spot instances without risking data availability, minimizing idle resource waste.
About Aklivity
Aklivity is the developer of the Zilla Data Platform, a cloud-native connectivity layer engineered for real-time streams and fully compliant with the AsyncAPI standard. It aims to transform raw infrastructure into governed, discoverable Data Products for Web, Mobile, IoT, and microservices.
Unlike fragile custom glue code or heavyweight connectors, Aklivity adopts a stateless, declarative architecture based on the Zilla proxy, which enables direct multi-protocol mediation (HTTP, SSE, MQTT, gRPC) to Kafka, greatly simplifying integration logic and decoupling external clients from backend topology. Leveraging the "shift-left" governance model and high-performance non-blocking I/O, Aklivity achieves native contract enforcement and reliable security at the edge while providing massive scalability for modern data ecosystems.
Seamless Protocol Mediation
Instead of building fragile point-to-point integrations and glue code, Zilla provides native protocol mediation between standard clients and Kafka-backed streams. Web (HTTP/WebSocket/SSE), mobile, and IoT (MQTT/gRPC) clients can consume and produce real-time data through Zilla without custom connectors or sidecars.
Contract-Driven Streaming with AsyncAPI
Aklivity productizes raw Kafka streams into governed Data Products by formalizing them with well-defined AsyncAPI contracts. Contracts become the source of truth for channels, payload schemas, and access semantics—turning topics into reusable, versioned interfaces teams can rely on.
Decoupled & Stateless Architecture
Built for the cloud-native era, Zilla acts as a stateless data plane that decouples clients from the backend broker topology. This allows AutoMQ to scale brokers or rebalance partitions instantly without forcing frontend clients to reconnect, creating a truly elastic, zero-downtime streaming stack.
AutoMQ × Aklivity: The Stateless Stack for Cloud-Native Streaming
The integration of AutoMQ's stateless, shared-storage architecture and Aklivity's streaming-native gateway achieves an evolved cloud-native data architecture. By decoupling protocol mediation from stream storage, the combined solution delivers seamless connectivity, elastic scaling, and enhanced governance for the cloud-native era.
Protocol Mediation: Expanding Connectivity at the Edge
Aklivity's Zilla Gateway acts as a universal translator for AutoMQ, enabling Web (HTTP/SSE), Mobile, and IoT (MQTT/gRPC) devices to communicate directly with Kafka clusters without fragile "glue code" or custom connectors. This architecture decouples frontend clients from backend topology, allowing AutoMQ to rebalance partitions or scale brokers instantly while Zilla maintains stable, seamless connections for edge devices.
Contract Governance: Enhancing Security and Policy Enforcement
The joint solution establishes a robust security perimeter from the edge to the VPC. Aklivity handles protocol-level governance, including AsyncAPI contract enforcement, RBAC, and audit logging at the gateway layer. Simultaneously, AutoMQ helps ensure data privacy by deploying its data plane within the user's VPC via BYOC, and supports end‑to‑end TLS/mTLS encryption across computation and access layers.
Architectural Innovation: Stateless Efficiency via a Shared-Storage Architecture
The synergy between both platforms significantly improves streaming efficiency by shifting from traditional shared-nothing designs to a modern shared‑storage architecture. AutoMQ's diskless, stateless architecture offloads all data to S3, transforming Kafka brokers into pure compute nodes that scale in seconds. Combined with Aklivity's lightweight, non-blocking I/O gateway, enterprises achieve a truly elastic streaming stack that greatly reduces the operational overhead and cross‑replication constraints typical of traditional stateful infrastructure.
Looking Ahead
AutoMQ and Aklivity will continue to deepen their technological integration, jointly driving the development of cloud-native real-time data infrastructure. Together, they will provide global enterprises with lower-cost, higher-performance, easier-to-maintain, and secure real-time data streaming solutions, accelerating the development of data-driven applications and business insights, and jointly building an open and efficient cloud-native data ecosystem.
Visit the AutoMQ website now to learn about the ultimate performance and cost advantages of the next-generation cloud-native Kafka.
Visit the Aklivity website to explore multi-protocol gateway solutions for real-time data management.