StreamHouse
S3-native Kafka alternative written in Rust
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Hey HN,I built StreamHouse, an open-source streaming platform that replaces Kafka's broker-managed storage with direct S3 writes. The goal: same semantics, fraction of the cost.How it works: Producers batch and compress records, a stateless server manages partition routing and metadata (SQLite for dev, PostgreSQL for prod), and segments land directly in S3. Consumers read from S3 with a local segment cache. No broker disks to manage, no replication factor to tune — S3 gives you 11 nines of durability out of the box.What's there today: - Producer API with batching, LZ4 compression, and offset tracking (62K records/sec) - Consumer API with consumer groups, auto-commit, and multi-partition fanout (30K+ records/sec) - Kafka-compatible protocol (works with existing Kafka clients) - REST API, gRPC API, CLI, and a web UI - Docker Compose setup for trying it locally in 5 minutesThe cost model is what motivated this. Kafka's storage costs scale with replication factor × retention × volume. With S3 at $0.023/GB/month, storing a TB of events costs ~$23/month instead of hundreds on broker EBS volumes.Written in Rust, ~50K lines across 15 crates. Apache 2.0 licensed.GitHub: https://github.com/gbram1/streamhouseHappy to answer questions about the architecture, tradeoffs, or what I learned building this.
HN · launched Feb 25, 2026 · 10 upvotes (top 47%) · 0 views
Niche: event streaming platforms · 38 launches, 2 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 38 launches in event streaming platforms →
Could you build this?
No Implementing a distributed streaming system with Kafka semantics directly on S3 demands deep expertise in distributed systems, consensus, storage tiering, zero-copy I/O, and Rust systems programming.
What it would actually take: A real implementation requires custom Rust storage engines using async runtimes (Tokio), optimized multipart S3 write batching, strict partitioned log semantics, and Raft/distributed consensus or strict distributed metadata locking. The core difficulty lies in achieving low consumer latency and high write throughput against S3's eventual consistency and object-creation latencies while guaranteeing exact-once or at-least-once delivery guarantees.
Discussion
8 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: rustfs, minio, Kafka, S3
Concerns raised: quickstart has errors, requires API key setup, minio no longer maintained, higher latency than alternatives
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 166 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #94 of 167 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
- Artie Managed Kafka: Apache Kafka for half the cost of MSK · yc · 2026-11-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- BlazeMQ · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- S2-lite, an open source Stream Store · hn · 2026-01-21 · 77 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Streambed · hn · 2026-05-31 · 129 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- UnisonDB · hn · 2025-11-01 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- DuckDB for Kafka Stream Processing · hn · 2025-12-08 · 77 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Sofka · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Durable Streams · hn · 2025-12-09 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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