The Problem with Traditional Brokers
When we started building StreamHouse, we asked ourselves a simple question: if you were designing a streaming platform today, with cloud-native infrastructure available, would you still use local disks?
The answer was clearly no.
The Hidden Costs of Disk-Based Streaming
Traditional brokers like Kafka were designed in an era when local SSDs were the fastest storage option. But this architecture carries significant hidden costs in cloud environments:
1. Replication Overhead
- 3x the EBS storage costs
- Significant inter-AZ network traffic (expensive)
- Complex leader election and ISR management
2. Capacity Planning Nightmares
- Over-provision to handle traffic spikes
- Under-utilize most of the time
- Manual rebalancing when adding capacity
3. Operational Complexity
- Monitor disk usage and IOPS
- Plan partition migrations
- Handle broker failures and recovery
The S3 Insight
- 11 nines of durability (99.999999999%)
- Unlimited capacity
- No replication management
- Pay only for what you store
The question became: can we build a streaming platform that leverages S3 as the source of truth?
How StreamHouse Works
StreamHouse uses a disaggregated architecture:
┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐
│ Producers │────▶│ Agents │────▶│ S3 │
└─────────────┘ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────┐
│ Metadata │
│ (Postgres) │
└─────────────┘- Buffer incoming events in memory
- Flush segments to S3 periodically
- Serve reads from cache or S3
- Topic and partition configurations
- Consumer group offsets
- Agent leases and watermarks
No event data touches the metadata store. This keeps it lightweight and fast.
The Results
- 80% lower costs vs. traditional Kafka deployments
- Zero disk management - no provisioning, no monitoring
- Instant scaling - add agents without data migration
- Built-in durability - S3's 11 nines out of the box
Trade-offs
S3-native streaming isn't without trade-offs:
Latency: S3 writes add 50-100ms latency vs. local disk. For most use cases, this is acceptable. For ultra-low-latency requirements, hybrid architectures work well.
S3 API costs: High-throughput workloads can incur S3 API charges. StreamHouse mitigates this with intelligent batching and caching.
Conclusion
The cloud changed the economics of storage. StreamHouse embraces this reality by building on S3 from day one. The result is a simpler, cheaper, and more reliable streaming platform.
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