# From Always-On to On-Demand: Scaling Kafka Sinks with KEDA

DevFeed: [From Always-On to On-Demand: Scaling Kafka Sinks with KEDA](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/from-always-on-to-on-demand-scaling-kafka-sinks-with-keda-28057.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://tech.trivago.com/post/2026-02-18-from-always-on-to-on-demand-scaling-kafka-sinks-with-keda/>)

Author: Armin Aminian SRE; Cloud Native technologies GitHub profile Linkedin profile

Published: 2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Trivago](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/trivago.md>)

Topics: [Kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kafka.md>), [autoscaling](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/autoscaling.md>), [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [event driven](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/event-driven.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>)

Tags: [autoscaling](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/autoscaling.md>), [backend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backend.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [devops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/devops.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [event-driven](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/event-driven.md>), [kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kafka.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [services](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/services.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how trivago uses KEDA to scale Kafka sink consumers on Kubernetes down to zero when consumer lag is absent and back up when work arrives. It describes the sinks' role in applying business logic and maintaining service-local materialized views, along with the operational motivation and rollout considerations.

## Source excerpt

Kafka sits at the heart of how we move data between systems at trivago. Many teams publish changes to Kafka, and downstream services consume those changes to keep user-facing features up to date...