How do you configure tiered storage for a Kafka topic?

Tiered storage lets a topic's older log segments move from local broker disks to cheaper, more scalable remote object storage (like S3-compatible storage), while recent, actively-read data stays on fast local disk — extending effective retention far beyond what local broker disk capacity alone could support, without needing ever-larger local volumes.

# broker-level
remote.log.storage.system.enable=true

# per-topic
remote.storage.enable=true
local.retention.ms=86400000     # keep 1 day locally
retention.ms=2592000000          # but retain 30 days total, in the remote tier

From a client's perspective, the split is transparent: a consumer requesting an old offset that's already moved to the remote tier is served by the broker fetching it from remote storage automatically, without the application needing to know or care where the data physically lives. The main trade-off is latency — reads that hit the remote tier are slower than reads served from local disk — which is why local.retention.ms is tuned to keep the actively-consumed recent window on fast local storage while older, rarely-read history moves to the cheaper tier.

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