AutoMQ Diskless Kafka

AutoMQ was founded in 2022 by Xiaorui Wang, Xinyu Zhou and Wensong Zhang, engineers with more than a decade of Apache Kafka experience; the site is operated by AutoMQ HK Limited. It tackles the high cost of running Kafka in the cloud, driven by local disks, over-provisioning and cross-zone replication traffic.

AutoMQ keeps the Kafka core and redesigns the storage layer so brokers are stateless and data lives directly on object storage such as S3, GCS or Azure Blob. This allows autoscaling in seconds, automatic partition balancing and zero cross-zone transfer fees, while staying 100% Kafka compatible. It is delivered as BYOC through the console, Terraform, REST API and cloud marketplaces, or as AutoMQ Software on Kubernetes or private data centers, with Table Topic writing streams to Iceberg or Delta Lake. Customers include Grab, Tencent, JD.com, Geely, LG U+ and Bitkub.

• Diskless architecture: Kafka data stored directly on S3, GCS or Azure Blob.
• Stateless autoscaling: Brokers scale and rebalance partitions in seconds without downtime.
• Zero cross-AZ traffic: Zone-aware routing removes inter-zone replication fees.
• Table Topic: Streams written as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake tables.
• AutoMQ Linking: Migration from existing Kafka clusters and multi-cluster disaster recovery.
• Flexible delivery: BYOC on AWS, GCP, Azure or Oracle, or software on Kubernetes and private data centers.

A Vietnamese e-wallet or ride-hailing app can move high-volume Kafka clusters to object storage to cut cloud bills. A crypto exchange can scale streaming capacity during market spikes without pre-provisioning. A retailer can land order streams directly into Iceberg tables for analytics.

Stateless brokers scale in seconds instead of hours of partition reassignment, removing the need to over-provision. Clients connect to local-zone brokers and storage is shared, eliminating cross-zone data transfer fees; the vendor's calculator claims savings of up to 74% versus Amazon MSK. Existing Kafka clients and more than 300 connectors work unchanged, and a 30-day free trial requires no credit card.

Kafka is the standard for event streaming, but cloud network and storage costs make large clusters expensive. Companies across Asia, including ride-hailing, fintech and crypto platforms, are adopting object-storage-based streaming to cut these costs while keeping the Kafka ecosystem.

Founded in 2022; open-source launch in November 2023. Named an AWS Differentiated Partner in August 2025 and launched a managed service on Tencent Cloud in October 2025. Reported more than 100 enterprise customers in December 2025. Investors include Vision Plus Capital, GSR Ventures, Ginkgo Valley Capital and Monad Ventures.