Skip to main contentWhat Is AutoMQ
AutoMQ is a cloud-native streaming platform that is fully compatible with Apache Kafka. Built on object storage (S3), AutoMQ delivers up to 10x cost reduction and seconds-level elasticity compared to self-managed Kafka.
Why AutoMQ: The Cloud Changed Everything
Apache Kafka was designed over a decade ago for on-premise data centers, where disks were physically attached to servers and hardware failures were common. To handle this reality, Kafka adopted a Shared Nothing architecture: each broker manages its own local storage, and data is replicated across multiple nodes for durability and availability. This made perfect sense for the infrastructure of that era.
But the cloud fundamentally changed the rules.
In cloud environments, compute and storage are decoupled by design. Services like AWS S3 deliver 99.999999999% durability with production-grade SLAs. Storage is no longer a liability—it’s a managed, virtually infinite resource. Yet when Kafka is lifted-and-shifted to the cloud, it still treats storage as unreliable local disks, replicating data multiple times across brokers. The result: redundant replication on top of already-durable cloud storage, leading to unnecessary compute, storage, and network costs.
Kafka remains the de facto standard for data streaming—the backbone of modern data infrastructure. A technology this critical deserves an architecture built for the cloud, not just deployed on it. That’s why we created AutoMQ.
Design Philosophy
Rewrite Storage, Preserve Compute
AutoMQ is not a ground-up rewrite of Kafka. After a decade of development, Kafka has a battle-tested compute layer with sophisticated APIs, complex protocol handling, and proven production reliability. Rewriting all of this would be both impractical and unnecessary.
The real problem is storage. Kafka’s Shared Nothing storage architecture—designed for unreliable local disks—is the root cause of its cloud inefficiency. Our strategy is surgical: replace the storage layer while keeping the compute layer intact.
This approach delivers:
- 100% Kafka API compatibility—every client, every protocol version works unchanged
- 100% ecosystem compatibility—Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, and MirrorMaker work out of the box
- Seamless migration—existing workloads move to AutoMQ without application changes
S3-First, Diskless Architecture
We chose S3 as AutoMQ’s storage foundation. S3 is the largest-scale storage service in the cloud, and that scale is precisely why it works: massive scale enables elasticity, pay-per-use pricing, and unmatched cost efficiency.
S3 by the numbers:
- 500+ trillion objects stored globally
- >1 PB/s peak traffic capacity
- 1/10 the cost of block storage
- Universal availability—every region, every major cloud, accessible via simple HTTP
S3 isn’t just an AWS service—it’s a cloud standard. Nearly every provider offers S3-compatible storage, making AutoMQ portable across clouds.
By building on S3, AutoMQ brokers become completely diskless. No local storage means no state, and stateless brokers can be replaced instantly, scheduled anywhere, and scaled without data migration.
Built for Cloud Economics
True cloud-native means designing for how the cloud actually works—not just running traditional software on cloud VMs.
AutoMQ is architected around cloud primitives:
- Cloud storage for durability—leverage S3’s eleven 9s instead of application-level replication
- Cloud APIs for orchestration—automated scaling, recovery, and resource management
- Cloud pricing models—Spot Instances, pay-per-use, no over-provisioning
In on-premise environments, capacity changes require procurement cycles. In the cloud, resources arrive via API in seconds. AutoMQ embraces this reality: scale out instantly when traffic spikes, scale in when it drops, and never pay for idle capacity.
Key Benefits
Simplified Operations
Running self-managed Kafka requires significant operational investment: disk provisioning, capacity planning, manual partition rebalancing, and around-the-clock monitoring for disk failures. These tasks create on-call burden and slow down your team.
AutoMQ’s stateless architecture eliminates these operational challenges:
- No disk management—brokers store no persistent data locally, removing the need for disk provisioning, RAID configuration, and capacity planning
- Automatic failover—when a broker fails, a replacement takes over in seconds without data recovery or manual intervention
- Self-balancing clusters—partitions automatically redistribute as brokers join or leave the cluster
Scale in Seconds, Not Hours
Scaling self-managed Kafka is notoriously difficult. Adding brokers triggers partition reassignment, which copies terabytes of data across the network—a process that can take hours or days. Worse, this replication traffic competes with production workloads, potentially degrading performance exactly when you need more capacity.
Because all data resides in S3, AutoMQ scaling requires no data migration:
- Seconds-level partition reassignment—what takes hours in traditional Kafka completes in seconds
- On-demand capacity—add brokers during traffic spikes, remove them when demand drops
- Native auto-scaling integration—connect to cloud auto-scaling groups for fully automated capacity management
This matters for business continuity. When traffic spikes unexpectedly, you can’t afford to wait hours for rebalancing to complete. With AutoMQ, capacity scales as fast as your business needs it—protecting revenue and customer experience during peak demand.
Lower Costs
AutoMQ reduces total cost of ownership by up to 10x compared to self-managed Kafka:
- Storage costs reduced by 90%—S3 is approximately 1/10 the price of EBS, and AutoMQ eliminates the 3x replication overhead of traditional Kafka
- Zero cross-AZ traffic fees—shared storage architecture removes the expensive cross-AZ data transfer that multi-AZ Kafka deployments require
- Pay for what you use—scale down during off-peak hours instead of provisioning for peak capacity
Next Steps
Ready to get started? Here’s where to go next:
