Tiered storage solutions won't fix Kafka's issues, and instead, introduce new challenges such as increased unpredictability and difficulty in management. Zero Disk Architectures (ZDAs) offer a better solution by eliminating disks altogether, achieving zero disks with everything running directly through object storage. ZDAs enable auto-scaling, radically flexible topologies, and deployment models, making it easier to manage data streaming workloads. They also facilitate HTAP capabilities, enabling transactional and analytical workloads to operate on the same dataset without replication delay. With ZDAs, developers can create single logical clusters that span traditional cloud networking boundaries in a cost-effective manner. Additionally, ZDAs enable feature-rich agents that can handle writes or reads for any topic-partition, making it feasible to scale out writes or reads on a moment's notice. They also bring security and compliance benefits by isolating producers from consumers and allowing customers to manage their own compute/data plane with zero cross-account IAM access or privileges granted to the vendor. Overall, Zero Disk Architectures are transforming the data streaming space by flipping pricing, capabilities, and deployment models entirely on their head.