As near as I can tell, the claims of huge cost savings derive from the difficulty dynamically scaling Kafka and improved multitenancy. So if different pieces of your company each have overprovisioned kafka clusters, they could all move to Ursa and save all the overprovisioning.
I have not tried it, and full disclosure, I really like Kafka: it's one of the pieces of software that has been rock solid for me. I built a project where it quietly ingested low gb/s of data with year-long uptimes.
The bulk of the cost savings comes from the use of object storage rather than attached disks. This eliminates the inter-AZ networking costs associated with Kafka replication mechanism.
I have not tried it, and full disclosure, I really like Kafka: it's one of the pieces of software that has been rock solid for me. I built a project where it quietly ingested low gb/s of data with year-long uptimes.
I break all of the costs down in the following e-book. https://streamnative.io/ebooks/reducing-kafka-costs-with-lea...