Buf blog

Stanislav Kozlovski's deep dive into the Kafka creation story appeared last weekend. It detailed how LinkedIn solved data problems with Kafka and also revealed three remaining challenges—schema evolution, plug-and-play integration, and ownership/governance—that had to be solved with additional tools and review processes. At Buf, we've seen these same problems, and solved them with the Buf CLI, Bufstream, and the Buf Schema Registry.

When you're working with mission-critical streaming data, any record flowing through your pipelines is a potential point of failure. When schemas drift or malformed data sneaks through, your downstream systems don't just slow down—they break. Hard. And if you're on-call, you know exactly what that 3 AM wake-up call feels like.

We’re announcing a major step toward our vision of a single schema definition in Protobuf that governs your entire data flow — from API contracts to streaming topics to analytical tables. Bufstream now supports Databricks Managed Iceberg Tables in private preview, bringing together Buf's schema-first approach with Databricks' industry-leading data governance and optimization capabilities. This integration represents more than just technical compatibility—it's a fundamental shift toward treating schemas as the foundation of your entire data architecture.

We're excited to announce that Bufstream is now available on the AWS Marketplace. Enterprise customers can purchase through their AWS account and accelerate their deployment of Bufstream.

If you're looking for a modern drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka to save costs and complexity, Bufstream is probably your best bet. However, we've got a bigger mission here. Buf wants to bring schema-driven development across your entire stack, from your network APIs, to your streaming data, to your lakehouse, unified behind one schema language that can do it all.

Bufstream — Buf’s drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka® — now supports business-critical workloads with multi-region, active-active clusters on GCP.

At less than $1M/month for 100 GiB/s of writes and 300 GiB/s of reads, Bufstream using Spanner is 25x cheaper than Confluent Cloud, 1.5x cheaper than WarpStream, and 3x cheaper than self-hosted Apache Kafka®.

Jepsen's Bufstream report bolsters enterprise use of Buf’s elastic Kafka-compatible streaming platform to enable data quality, enforce governance policies, and cut costs 8x

We're excited to announce the public beta of Bufstream, a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka deployed entirely in your own VPC that's 8x less expensive to operate.