Confluent Now Offers Apache Kafka as a Service with Confluent Cloud

Streaming platform provider Confluent has announced Confluent Cloud, a fully managed streaming data offering that offers Apache Kafka as a service. It’s touted as being simple to use, reliable, and secure enough to allow developers to focus on building their apps instead of on handling Kafka operations.

The new cloud offering expands Kafka’s integration capabilities, the company stated, along with new tools to optimize and manage Kafka clusters. Confluent Cloud now gives developers the option to use the cloud to build and run their applications.

 “Confluent Cloud is a major milestone in our journey of increasing the reach of a Kafka-based streaming platform for developers everywhere, be it on-premises or in the cloud. Now, developers can focus on building applications and driving business value from streaming, instead of worrying about service continuity,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluent. “This is a big step toward realizing our vision of Confluent’s streaming platform at the heart of every company.”

According to the company’s announcement, key features include:

• Access to the Kafka Ecosystem – Unlike proprietary streaming services from cloud providers, Confluent Cloud offers the same open-source Apache Kafka APIs that developers are familiar with, making it easy to leverage clients, connectors and tools supported by the Kafka and Confluent communities.

• Cloud Optionality – In a recent survey of over 350 Apache Kafka users, 52% are using Kafka in the public cloud. In fact, nearly one-third (32%) of respondents who use Kafka in the cloud are running at least 6 applications with Kafka. Confluent Cloud is vendor agnostic, so you can “lift and shift” your Kafka infrastructure from any location into — or out of — any cloud.

• Improved Developer Productivity – Confluent Cloud is a hosted streaming data service that unleashes developer productivity. It takes away the operational burden of running Kafka and lets developers focus on building streaming applications. Simple, resilient, secure and performant, teams can focus on what matters most – building the company.

• Reduction in Ops Burden – As cluster usage grows, failures are more likely. With Confluent Cloud, it’s easy to get Kafka up and running.

Confluent Cloud is currently available through an early access program. Initially it will be available in Amazon Web Services but support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud will be added later.

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Big data platforms: Hadoop, Spark and Kafka