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Choosing your plan

Choosing your plan

Event Streams is available as Lite plan, Standard plan, Enterprise plan, or Satellite plan depending on your requirements.

For information about Event Streams plan pricing, see the catalog. Search for Event Streams, then click the Event Streams tile to go to the provisioning page.

Lite plan

The Lite plan is free for users who want to try out Event Streams or build a proof-of-concept. Do not use the Lite plan for production use. It offers shared access to a multi-tenant Event Streams cluster.

Standard plan

The Standard plan is appropriate if you require event ingest and distribution capabilities but do not require any additional benefits of the Enterprise plan. The Standard plan offers shared access to a multi-tenant Event Streams cluster that seamlessly autoscales as you increase the number of partitions you are using for your workload.

The architecture is highly available by default. The service is distributed across three availability zones, which means that the cluster is resilient to the failure of a single zone or any component within that zone.

Enterprise plan

The Enterprise plan is appropriate if data isolation, performance, and increased retention are important considerations. The Enterprise plan includes the following features:

  • Exclusive access to a single-tenant Event Streams service instance deployed in a highly available multi zone region (MZR).
  • Option to provision a single-tenant Event Streams service instance in a geographically local but single zone location (SZR).
  • Scaling options to customize throughput, storage capacity, or both.

The architecture is highly available when you choose to deploy into a multi-zone region. The service is distributed across three availability zones, which means that the cluster is resilient to the failure of a single zone or any component within that zone.

Satellite plan

The IBM Cloud Satellite® plan is appropriate if you want to deploy an Enterprise plan into Satellite locations of your own choice. Using Satellite, you can create a hybrid environment that brings the scalability and on-demand flexibility of public cloud services to the applications and data that run in your secure private cloud.

The Event Streams Satellite plan does not yet provide the compliance certifications that the Enterprise or Standard plans conform to.

What is supported by the Lite, Standard, Enterprise, and Satellite plans

The following table summarizes what is supported by the plans:

Plan comparison table
Lite plan Standard plan Enterprise plan Satellite plan
Tenancy Multi-tenant Multi-tenant Single tenant Single tenant
Availability zones 3 3 3
(1 in single zone locations)		 3
Availability 99.99% [1] 99.99% 99.99% (99.9% in single zone locations) [2] Not applicable
Kafka version on cluster Kafka 3.6 Kafka 3.6 Kafka 3.6 Kafka 3.6
Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams supported No Yes Yes Yes
Stream to Cloud Object Storage by using Data Engine [3] No Yes (deprecated) Yes (deprecated) No
Managed Schema Registry supported No No Yes Yes [4]
Customer-managed encryption No No Yes [5] No
Fine-grained access control Yes Yes Yes Yes
Activity tracker events No Yes Yes No
Monitoring Event Streams metrics by using IBM Cloud Monitoring Yes Yes Yes Yes
Private Networking (Cloud Service Endpoint support) No No Yes Not applicable
Scale plan capacity No No Yes No
Maximum number of partitions 1 [6] 100 3000 - 9000 scales with throughput [7] 3000
Maximum retention limits 100 MB for the partition 1 GB per partition 2 TB - 12 TB of scalable usable storage [8] 2 TB of usable storage
Maximum throughput 100 KB per second per partition 1 MB per second per partition (20 MB per service instance) 150 MB/s - 450 MB/s of scalable throughput [9] 150 MB/s [10]
Maximum message size 1 MB 1 MB 1 MB 1 MB
Maximum number of connected clients 5 500 10 000 10 000
Location (region) availability Dallas (us-south) Multizone location (MZR)
Dallas (us-south)
Sao Paulo (br-sao)
Toronto (ca-tor)
Washington (us-east)
Frankfurt (eu-de)
London (eu-gb)
Madrid (eu-es)
Osaka (jp-osa)
Sydney (au-syd)
Tokyo (jp-tok)		 Multizone location (MZR)
Dallas (us-south)
Sao Paulo (br-sao)
Toronto (ca-tor)
Washington (us-east)
Frankfurt (eu-de)
London (eu-gb)
Madrid (eu-es)
Osaka (jp-osa)
Sydney (au-syd)
Tokyo (jp-tok)

Single zone location (SZR)
Chennai (che01)

 Your Satellite location managed in
Dallas
Sao Paulo
Toronto
Washington
Frankfurt
London
Osaka
Sydney
Tokyo
APIs supported Kafka API
Admin REST API
REST Producer API		 Kafka API
Admin REST API
REST Producer API		 Kafka API
Admin REST API
REST Producer API
Schema Registry API		 Kafka API
Admin REST API
REST Producer API
Schema Registry API [11]
Deployment timeframe Instantaneous provisioning Instantaneous provisioning Expect provisioning to take up to 3 hours. As Enterprise has its own dedicated resources for each cluster, it requires more time for provisioning. If all your infrastructure is correctly in place, expect provisioning to take up to 1 hour because Satellite has its own dedicated resources for each instance.
Compliance GDPR
Privacy Shield		 GDPR
Privacy Shield
ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 2701
SOC 1 Type
SOC 2 Type 2
SOC 3
PCI DSS
ISMAP
C5 		GDPR
Privacy Shield
ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 2701
SOC 1 Type 2
SOC 2 Type 2
SOC 3
HIPAA ready
PCI DSS
ISMAP
C5
IRAP 		GDPR
ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 2701 [12]
Manage security and compliance No No Yes No
IAM address restrictions No Yes Yes No
IAM token authentication only No No Yes Yes
Mirroring No No Yes No

For more information about limits, see limits and quotas.

  1. After 30 days of inactivity, your instance is deleted. (Inactivity is defined as a zero bytes_out metric, even though you might create a partition or produced messages.) ↩︎

  2. For more information about availability, see single zone location deployments. ↩︎

  3. IBM Cloud® Data Engine is deprecated. As of 18 February 2024 you can't create new instances, and access to free instances will be removed. Existing Standard plan instances are supported until 18 January 2025. Any instances that still exist on that date will be deleted. For more information, see Deprecation of Data Engine. ↩︎

  4. The Schema Registry API is not automatically enabled on the Satellite plan. For more information about how to enable it, see Enable the schema registry API. ↩︎

  5. Only supported on clusters that were created after October 2019. ↩︎

  6. If you migrate from the Lite to the Standard plan, allow a few minutes for the cached limit of one partition to clear. You can then take advantage of the 100 partition limit for the Standard plan. ↩︎

  7. This value scales relative to the maximum throughput. For example, if you have a throughput of 150 MB/s the maximum partitions would be 3000, for a throughput of 300 MB/s, 6000 and for 450 MB/s, 9000. This limit is a hard limit for partitions on the Enterprise plan. If you reach this limit, you can no longer create topics. If you want to adjust the number of partitions, you can use the self-service option described in Scaling Enterprise plan capacity. There is a 3000 partition limit per 2 TB storage with a maximum limit of 18000 partitions with a 12 TB option, which cannot be exceeded. ↩︎

  8. Maximum message retention (storage) can be specified when the service instance is created. Storage can be later scaled independently as demands increase. The minimum usable storage available is dependent upon the number of capacity units that are configured for the service instance. For more information about capacity options, see Scaling Event Streams capacity. ↩︎

  9. Maximum throughput can be specified when the service instance is created. Throughput is expressed as the sum of the number of bytes per second that can be both sent and received in a service instance. Throughput can be later scaled as demands increase. Although throughput scaling is independent of storage, a defined minimum storage amount is required for each tier. For more information about capacity options, see Scaling Event Streams capacity. ↩︎

  10. The Satellite plan design and deployment is similar to the Enterprise plan and provides a maximum throughput of 150 MB/s. The flexibility of the Satellite environment can impact the actual maximum throughput. When you provide infrastructure for your Satellite deployment, the following items might impact throughput: 1) Performance of hosts that are attached to your Satellite location for use by Event Streams. 2) Type, configuration, and performance of the block storage provided. 3) Network latency between the hosts, block storage, and the Satellite location. 4) For information about infrastructure, see Before you begin. ↩︎

  11. The Schema Registry API is not automatically enabled on the Satellite plan. For information about how to enable it, see Enable the schema registry API. ↩︎

  12. All compliance certifications available on the Standard and Enterprise plans are currently not available on the Satellite plan. Adding the same certifications to the Satellite plan is in process. For general Satellite compliance standards information, see Platform compliance and certification and Compliance standards FAQ. ↩︎