Why Kifa

Kifa is a storage engine for transaction logs on edge devices. It uses a write-ahead log with configurable fsync to guarantee that every confirmed write survives power failure. Built for POS terminals and mobile money agents operating in unreliable environments.

When a payment terminal loses power mid-transaction, Kifa keeps the data written before the crash. No SQLite. No external database. A single binary that does one thing well.

Built for the Edge

Constraint	How Kifa Addresses It
Unreliable power	Configurable fsync modes, from batched to per-write durability
Limited resources	Single static binary, minimal memory footprint
Offline operation	No network dependencies, everything stored locally
Audit requirements	Immutable append-only log with timestamp ordering

What Makes It Different

Feature	Kifa	SQLite	Plain Files
Crash-proof writes	Yes	Yes	No
No runtime dependencies	Yes	No	Yes
Configurable durability	Yes	Limited	No
Append-optimized	Yes	No	Yes
Query by time range	Yes	Yes	No
Built-in compaction	Yes	Yes	No
Direct I/O (Linux)	Yes	No	No

What Kifa Is Not

Kifa is not a general-purpose database. It does not support random key-value access, SQL queries, or multi-table schemas. It is not a message queue, and it is not a replacement for a full observability stack.

Kifa is a durable local log for edge devices. Entries go in, entries come out, and nothing is lost in between.