Leveraging the power of persistence through event streaming platform: Confluent

Every byte of data has a story to tell, something of significance that will inform the next thing to be done. In a data-driven enterprise, how the data moved becomes nearly as important as the data itself. With greater speed and agility, data’s value increases exponentially.One such firm, primarily focusing on building an event streaming platform to help other companies get easy access to enterprise data as the real-time stream is Confluent.

Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka^®, Confluent creates an event streaming platform to access data as real-time streams. The firm has pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease-of-use, scalability, security, and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real-time.

Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, Confluent is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

What is Apache Kafka^®?

Apache Kafka is a community distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. Initially conceived as a messaging queue, Kafka is based on an abstraction of a distributed commit log. Since being created and open-sourced by LinkedIn in 2011, Kafka has quickly evolved from messaging queue to a full-fledged event streaming platform.

Products powered by Confluent

CONFLUENT PLATFORM – An event streaming platform built by the original creators of Apache Kafka^®

Confluent Platform improves Kafka with additional community and commercial features designed to enhance the streaming experience of both operators and developers in production, at a massive scale.The complete event streaming platform helps to connect all apps and data with the broadest ecosystem of clients and connectors for Kafka. It helps to process the data streams and respond in real-time with Kafka Streams and KSQL - Confluent’s streaming SQL engine.

Striking features of Confluent platform

• Deploy on any cloud, public or private, with a consistent platform and operating model
• It helps to stream across on-premises and public clouds with the industry’s hybrid streaming service
• Helps to choose an operational model as self-managed software or fully-managed service with Confluent Cloud

CONFLUENT KSQL – Streaming SQL for Apache Kafka

Confluent KSQL is the streaming SQL engine that enables real-time data processing against Apache Kafka^®. It provides an easy-to-use, yet powerful interactive SQL interface for stream processing on Kafka, without the need to write code in a programming language such as Java or Python. KSQL is scalable, elastic, fault-tolerant, and it supports a wide range of streaming operations, including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, and windowing.

CONFLUENT HUB – Discover and share Connectors and more

A Subscription to Confluent Hub provides access to a complete set of commercial features that deliver mission-critical reliability for the event streaming platform:

• Control Center which delivers a GUI to control and understand key aspects of an Apache Kafka cluster
• Replicator enables replication across data centers and public clouds for disaster recovery and distributed pipelines
• Auto Data Balancer optimizes resource utilization through a rack-aware algorithm that rebalances partitions across a Kafka cluster
• Security Plugins provides pass-through client credentials for REST Proxy and Schema Registry and mapping of AD/LDAP groups to Kafka ACLs
• MQTT Proxy provides access to Kafka from MQTT devices and gateways without the need for an MQTT Broker in the middle
• Connector’s offers commercially licensed connectors developed and supported by Confluent

CONFLUENT CLOUD – Apache Kafka re-engineered for the cloud

The cloud-native agility helps to Scale elastically between 0 - 100 Mbps without any size or provision clusters and starts streaming in minutes. Streams across hybrid and multi-clouds and builds a persistent bridge from on-premises to cloud with hybrid Kafka service stream across public clouds for multi-cloud data pipelines.

The formidable leader behind the success of Confluent

Jay Kreps is the co-founder, also serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Confluent, a company built around real-time data streams and the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka. He is also the original author of several open-source projects, including Apache Kafka, Apache Samza, Voldemort, and Azkaban.

“Confluent builds an event streaming platform that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams with the ease-of-use, scalability, security, and flexibility.”