Documentation

Welcome to Axiom Systems documentation. Whether you're migrating from self-managed Kafka or starting fresh, you'll find everything here.

Architecture overview

Axiom is built as a set of composable services sharing a common control plane and identity layer. All services are addressable via a single API gateway at api.axiom.io.

Components

• Ingest API — HTTP/2 and Kafka-protocol endpoints for writing data.
• Storage Engine — Columnar, tiered storage with NVMe hot layer and object cold layer.
• Query Engine — Distributed SQL engine (MPP) for real-time and historical queries.
• Control Plane — Cluster management, ACLs, schema registry, and billing metering.
• Replication Manager — Cross-region sync with configurable consistency guarantees.

Data flow

Producers write events to the Ingest API. Events land in the hot NVMe layer first (p99 < 8ms), then are compacted and tiered to cold storage asynchronously. Consumers can read from either layer transparently.

Authentication

All API calls require a Bearer token passed in the Authorization header. You can generate API keys from the console under Settings → API Keys.

curl https://api.axiom.io/v1/streams \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer axm_sk_your_key_here"

Token scopes

• read:streams — List and read stream metadata
• write:events — Publish events to streams
• admin:cluster — Manage topics, schemas, ACLs

Rate limits

The Ingest API is rate-limited per API key. Default limits are documented below. Enterprise plans can negotiate higher limits.

Plan	Ingest rate	Query rate	Burst
Starter	10 MB/s	10 req/s	50 req/s
Growth	500 MB/s	100 req/s	500 req/s
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom