Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Data Portal on Confluent Cloud. Data Portal is built on top of Stream Governance, the industry’s only fully managed data governance suite for Apache Kafka® and data streaming. The developer-friendly, self-service UI provides an easy and curated way to find, understand, and enrich all of your data streams, enabling users across your organization to build and launch streaming applications faster.

In a previous blog post (How To Survive an Apache Kafka® Outage) I outlined the effects on applications during partial or total Kafka cluster outages and proposed some architectural strategies to handle these types of service interruptions. The applications most heavily impacted by this type of outage are external interfaces that receive data, do not control request flow, and possibly perform some form of business transaction with the outside world before producing to Kafka.

Stepping into the world of Apache Kafka® can feel a bit daunting at first. I know this firsthand—while I have a background in real-time messaging systems, shifting into Kafka’s terminology and concepts seemed dense and complex. There’s a wealth of information out there, and it’s sometimes difficult to find the best (and, ideally, free) resources.

At this year’s Current, we introduced the public preview of our serverless Apache Flink® service, making it easier than ever to take advantage of stream processing without the complexities of infrastructure management. This first iteration of the service offers the Flink SQL API, which adheres to the ANSI standard and enables any user familiar with SQL to use Flink.

The Apache Flink PMC is pleased to announce the release of Apache Flink 1.18.0. As usual, we are looking at a packed release with a wide variety of improvements and new features. Overall, 174 people contributed to this release completing 18 FLIPS and 700+ issues. Thank you! Let's dive into the highlights.

It's not hard, it's just new. How can you, your business unit, and your enterprise utilize the exciting and emerging field of Generative AI to develop brand-new functionality? And once you’ve figured out your use cases, how do you successfully build in Generative AI? How do you scale it to production grade?

The Confluent Schema Registry plays a pivotal role in ensuring that producers and consumers in a streaming platform are able to communicate effectively. Ensuring the consistent use of schemas and their versions allows producers and consumers to easily interoperate, even when schemas evolve over time.

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 3.6.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent features. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

Ever dealt with a misbehaving consumer group? Imbalanced broker load? This could be due to your consumer group and partitioning strategy! Once, on a dark and stormy night, I set myself up for this error. I was creating an application to demonstrate how you can use Apache Kafka® to decouple microservices. The function of my “microservices” was to create latte objects for a restaurant ordering service.