The world is running on real-time data. From fraud detection and intelligence operations to AI-driven automation and customer engagement, businesses must process and act on data instantly. Yet, for the past two decades, event streaming has been constrained by rigid architectures, operational complexity, and inefficiencies that limit scale, fidelity, and analytical potential.
VAST is changing that.
We are thrilled to introduce the VAST Event Broker, a Kafka API-compatible, real-time event streaming engine that eliminates the need for Kafka clusters while unlocking a new era of performance, scalability, and simplicity. More than just a replacement for traditional event brokers, the VAST Event Broker is a game-changing architectural shift—bringing event streaming, analytics, and AI together in a unified, high-performance data platform .
Stateless Architecture: A Breakthrough for Event Streaming Enabling Real-time Analytics at Scale
Kafka revolutionized messaging and is widely adopted, but it comes with the inherent complexity of managing state and storage, requiring careful tuning, replication, and operational overhead to ensure reliability. VAST redefines this paradigm by introducing a truly stateless broker—eliminating the need for brokers to manage persistent state, instead leveraging VAST’s global storage architecture for resilience and scalability. Just as we pioneered stateless CNodes, we are now bringing that same simplicity to Kafka-like event streaming, enabling seamless, high-performance real-time analytics at unlimited scale. This is a revolution for Kafka, but it’s what VAST has been doing for seven years across other protocols: delivering unlimited scale and performance without the operational headaches.
Additionally, the VAST Event Broker streams data directly into DataBase tables in real time, unlocking instant, full-fidelity correlation and contextual search across all structured and unstructured data. This seamless integration eliminates the silos between streaming and analytics, allowing organizations to extract immediate insights, enrich AI models, and enhance decision-making—all from a single, unified platform
Beyond Kafka: A New Model for Real-Time Workloads
For years, businesses have relied on Kafka for event streaming, but scaling Kafka introduces significant challenges:
- Cluster sprawl increases operational burden and failure points
- Data triplication adds unnecessary costs and complexity
- Limited fidelity forces organizations to retain only small windows of event data
- Slow analytics pipelines prevent real-time correlation and insight generation
The VAST Event Broker eliminates these constraints by integrating real-time event streaming directly into the VAST Data Platform. Now, organizations can ingest, store, analyze, and act on all data—structured and unstructured—in real time, without managing fragmented systems.
Key Advantages of the VAST Event Broker
-
A Unified Real-Time Platform: No More Kafka Clusters
Kafka requires dedicated infrastructure, manual tuning, and ongoing maintenance. The VAST Event Broker consolidates event streaming into a single, intelligent data platform, eliminating the need for external brokers and reducing operational complexity. With built-in reliability, fault tolerance, and zero data loss, VAST ensures that real-time pipelines are always running at full fidelity.
Unlike Kafka, which relies on log segments stored on local disks and must replicate data across brokers using ISR (In-Sync Replicas), the VAST Event Broker leverages VAST’s disaggregated, high-performance storage layer. This eliminates IO bottlenecks, reduces operational overhead, and ensures instant access to event streams without local storage limitations.
-
10x Performance & Linear Scalability
Traditional event streaming struggles to scale efficiently, often requiring excessive infrastructure to handle increased workloads. The VAST Event Broker delivers a 10x+ performance advantage over Kafka on like-for-like hardware, with linear scaling, capable of processing up to 0.5 billion messages per second in our largest cluster deployments today.
Unlike Kafka, which ties compute and storage scaling together, VAST enables independent scaling, ensuring businesses can optimize for both performance and cost. Whether processing high-frequency event streams or massive, multi-modal datasets, VAST keeps up without bottlenecks. -
Real-Time Analytics Without Data Movement
In traditional architectures, streaming data is logged, ETL’d, and eventually analyzed—delaying insights and increasing data management overhead. With VAST, event topics are instantly accessible as SQL tables in the VAST DataBase, enabling real-time querying, deep correlation, and machine learning pipelines without moving data.
While Kafka requires log segment compaction and manual tiered storage to manage data retention, VAST automates lifecycle management through its distributed global namespace, ensuring that data remains accessible at full fidelity while reducing storage costs. -
Comprehensive Fidelity: Any Query, Any Time
Legacy event pipelines force compromises: limited retention, reduced granularity, and fragmented historical views. The VAST Event Broker removes these limitations, supporting high-fidelity, long-term event retention with zero performance degradation. This unlocks continuous real-time analytics, deep historical correlation, and AI-driven anomaly detection across all data—not just a rolling 7-day log.
Kafka traditionally limits historical event queries due to reliance on local disk retention policies. VAST, however, maintains complete transactional consistency using its scalable snapshot-based architecture, allowing time-travel queries across years of event data without reprocessing.
How It Works
The VAST Event Broker operates as a core component of the VAST DataEngine, providing a seamless and efficient event streaming solution. Architecturally, it leverages VAST’s CNodes, which serve as the platform’s computational backbone where protocols and data engines run natively. By embedding the Kafka-compatible Event Broker directly within these CNodes, VAST eliminates the need for external brokers, enabling low-latency, high-throughput event ingestion, processing, and distribution. This tight integration ensures optimized real-time data streaming, simplified deployment, and enhanced performance—all within the unified VAST Data Platform.
Here’s how it works:
- Producers publish events to a Kafka-compatible topic managed by VAST.
- The Event Broker efficiently ingests, processes, and stores events, leveraging VAST’s high-performance DataBase infrastructure.
- Consumers subscribe to topics, processing messages in real time to power analytics, AI, and automation workflows.
- Consumer groups distribute workloads, ensuring optimal parallel processing and fault tolerance.
- Event topics are stored as VAST DataBase tables, benefiting from built-in data reduction, storage optimization, and simplified event retention policies.
- By tightly integrating event streaming into the VAST DataEngine, the Event Broker provides unparalleled performance and operational efficiency without the need for separate event-processing infrastructure.
Redefining the Art of the Possible in Event Streaming
The VAST Event Broker isn’t just an incremental improvement—it’s a foundational shift in how businesses process real-time data. By merging event streaming, analytics, and AI in a single platform, VAST Data removes 20 years of data pipeline inefficiencies, eliminating triplication of data, slow ETL, and complex tuning.
With unparalleled scale, real-time queryability, and built-in storage optimization, organizations can now:
- Detect fraud in milliseconds, analyzing all transactions, not just sampled data.
- Correlate intelligence signals globally, without the constraints of short-lived event logs.
- Deliver customer experiences powered by true real-time AI, without fragmented infrastructures.
Expanding the VAST Data Platform Vision
With the launch of the VAST Event Broker, VAST Data realizes its vision of a unified data platform that integrates all data types and workloads. The VAST Data Platform simplifies data management at any scale by unifying object storage, databases, analytics, and AI processing within a single ecosystem.
- Unlimited Scale and Support for All Data: The VAST DataStore provides an exabyte-scale storage foundation that breaks traditional performance and capacity tradeoffs, allowing files, objects, block, and tables to coexist on a single, cost-efficient flash storage tier.
- One Platform for Every Workload: The VAST DataBase integrates transactional and analytical processing, eliminating the need for separate OLTP and OLAP systems.
- Automated Data Processing for All Workloads: The VAST DataEngine automates complex workflows by executing serverless functions directly within the platform, enabling real-time insights and event-driven AI processing.
- Optimized for AI/ML: With GPU-Direct capabilities, VAST accelerates AI/ML workloads by enabling high-speed, direct data transfers between GPUs and storage, ensuring seamless access to large-scale, diverse datasets.
The Future of Event-Driven Intelligence Starts Now
The VAST Event Broker represents a generational leap in real-time data processing. By removing the barriers of legacy event streaming architectures and delivering a truly unified data platform, VAST allows businesses to operate with unmatched speed, efficiency, and intelligence.
Getting started is simple—schedule a demo today and experience the power of next-generation real-time event processing firsthand.
Learn more at www.vastdata.com.
