Confluent Announces General Availability of Confluent Cloud

Confluent, provider of the streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, today announced that Confluent Cloud is generally available and ready for enterprise production workloads with a 99.95 percent service level agreement (SLA). Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud operationalizes the Confluent team’s expertise from managing some of the largest streaming environments in production today. The fully managed service helps companies deploy their Customer 360, fleet management, fraud detection, and other real-time, large-scale initiatives.  

Confluent Platform includes Confluent Cloud, Confluent Enterprise and Confluent Open Source, to create a more complete distribution of Apache Kafka intended for large-scale production across a variety of environments. It improves Apache Kafka by expanding its integration capabilities, adding tools to optimize and manage Kafka clusters, and ensuring the streams are secure. With Confluent Cloud, enterprises and developers have the option to build and run applications in the cloud, knowing that the team who created Kafka are maintaining and managing the Kafka clusters.

Key Confluent Cloud features:

• Latest Kafka capabilities: Always uses the latest Apache Kafka version so developers never have to worry about upgrades again.
• Performant: Highest throughput rate of any streaming data service. Standard plan is 5 MB/s and custom plans are available for any scale.
• Reliable: Optional support for multiple availability zones and 99.95 percent SLA.
• Client support: Full support for the range of clients offered by Confluent, including Java, Python, C/C++, Go and .NET, as well as the Kafka Streams API.
• Flexible: Configurable retention period, storage and throughput rate to suit any workload.
• Kafka expertise: Backed by the team that created Kafka that has the most extensive experience operating it at scale.

"Confluent Cloud is now production ready and capable of handling enterprise workloads, ideal for companies that are looking for experts to run their Apache Kafka as a Service for them," said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluent. "Enterprises and developers can now focus on building applications that provide value to the business, rather than worrying about managing and running Kafka."

Availability and Pricing

The service is currently available on AWS US-West-2 and US-East-1 Regions, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to be added in the future. Confluent Cloud is elastically priced based on usage. Contact Confluent for more details. For more information, please visit: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/.