In the digital age, businesses are expected to understand customer needs and adapt to them instantly—regardless of where they are or what is needed. These new expectations are why businesses are turning to event streaming platforms like Apache Kafka to transform data into a competitive asset. With Kafka®, they can put data at the center of their business for a new contextual view which completely changes how they interact with customers, respond to market movements and even create new revenue streams. However, like most open source software, Kafka isn’t designed to support the key attributes of cloud native systems that make transformational technologies easier to adopt, deploy and scale.

“There is a growing groundswell of adoption behind Apache Kafka with 60 percent of the Fortune 100 now using an event streaming platform to power their business,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder, chief technology and product officer, Confluent. “But many organizations don’t have the teams or resources needed to size, provision and manage Kafka clusters. With the latest enhancements to Confluent Cloud, we’re making it easier than ever for any data-starved business to transform into a business driven by data in a matter of minutes.”

Apache Kafka Re-Engineered for the Cloud

As part of its efforts to build a cloud-native Kafka service, Confluent is releasing major updates that enable elastic scalability and consumption-based pricing on Confluent Cloud. These updates reduce the initial investment and commitment to getting started with an event streaming platform and enable customers to scale their costs inline with use. Developers and project teams no longer need large IT teams and budgets to manage and provision Kafka clusters.

• Unparalleled elasticity – Confluent Cloud can now scale dynamically from 0 to 100 MBps and scale back down in seconds, and can scale further without limit beyond that with provisioned capacity. Now organizations can grow their use of Confluent Cloud seamlessly in-place from development to production deployments and autoscale instantly.
• Consumption-based pricing – Eliminates the need to size and provision clusters, or pay for unused capacity to account for seasonal, bursty traffic. With consumption-based pricing, Confluent becomes the only Kafka service that enables organizations to pay only for what is actually streamed.

As the pioneer of event streaming, Confluent continues to deliver on its promise to provide a complete event streaming platform. Kafka alone is incomplete without the ecosystem components needed to operate it at scale and at streaming maturity. To that end, Confluent is advancing its vision of a complete event streaming service by building fully managed services in three key areas:

• Confluent® Schema Registry – Fully managed, central registry to define standard schemas for events, share them across the organization and safely evolve them in a way that is backward compatible and future proof.
• Confluent® KSQL – Fully managed streaming SQL engine to enable real-time data processing with an easy-to-use, powerful interactive SQL interface – no need to write code.
• Kafka® S3 sink connector – Confluent® Connectors automate the integration of the most widely used data sources or sinks to Confluent Cloud. The first of the fully managed connectors launched by Confluent – Kafka S3 sink connector enables companies to easily sink data from Kafka to S3.

Fully managed Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent KSQL and Kafka S3 sink connector are currently available in public preview in both Confluent Cloud and Confluent Cloud Enterprise.

Resources

• Read more about the new additions to Confluent Cloud on the Confluent blog: https://www.confluent.io/blog/introducing-cloud-native-experience-for-apache-kafka-in-confluent-cloud
• Learn more about Confluent Cloud and sign up: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/.