Frequently asked questions
Migration, licensing, support, sovereignty and operations questions, answered.
- Do we have to replatform to use Streamtime?
- No. Support plans cover existing Kafka estates as-is — managed, self-hosted, or on any distribution. Every engagement also includes free migration services and $10,000 of consulting from Kafka experts, so you can move at your own pace.
- What infrastructure does Streamtime run on?
- Bootstrap directly on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud or Civo. Or bring your own Kubernetes: any OpenShift or CNCF-conformant cluster (1.32+) with a load balancer and a default CSI storage class. Data Center and edge deployments are supported.
- Which workloads are supported?
- Multi-tenant streaming (Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform with virtual clusters, Kafka Connect with hundreds of connectors including built-in Debezium, MirrorMaker for autonomous migrations and DR), stream processing (Apache Flink, Kafka Streams) and real-time analytics (ClickHouse, Apache Iceberg compatible) — on one fleet with one identity model and one operations model.
- How is Streamtime licensed?
- By usage, not reservation. Streaming workloads are metered in Kafka Units: 1 KU = 5 MB/s write + 15 MB/s read. Apache Flink and Kafka Streams are priced from state store size and parallel processing slots actually occupied. Bring-your-own-license models apply your existing OSS or commercial agreements directly.
- What support plans are available for existing Kafka?
- Silver ($12,000 per cluster, business-hours support), Gold ($24,000 per cluster, 24×7 across up to 3 environments) and Platinum (mission-critical production, engagement-specific terms). See the pricing page for details.
- Can Streamtime run in air-gapped environments?
- Yes. Connected, restricted-egress and true air-gap deployments share the same APIs, operators and workflows. In a true air-gap, the entire management plane moves inside your boundary with local registries, offline bundles and self-healing control planes.
- How does support work without an air-gapped environment?
- Air-gapped deployments get an insurance-style cover model: local services designed to self-heal against known failure modes, offline bundles carrying tested fixes, and support engagements through auditable, policy-controlled artifact exchanges rather than live tunnels into your enclave.
- Is the TCO assessment really free?
- Yes. We assess the total cost of your existing Kafka estate — anywhere it runs — and commit to a guaranteed price reduction in writing. If our proposal cannot beat your current spend, the assessment costs you nothing. Contact us to start.
- Can AI agents operate the platform?
- Yes. A Streamtime MCP server exposes the whole fleet — desired vs. actual state, metrics, recent changes, in-flight operations — to any MCP-capable agent, and the Streamtime AI assistant provides a purpose-built operations harness with guarded, verifiable actions.
- How is capacity sized?
- Empirically, not by rules of thumb. Clusters are benchmarked on your hardware — sustained throughput, latency envelopes and failure-mode headroom — and validated against your workload's declared intent before production use.
- Where can I learn more?
- Read the Sovereign Streaming whitepaper, browse docs.streamtime.ai, or contact us for a trial.