We talk a lot about how customers can use Confluent as the data backbone for event streaming applications and enable a new class of event-driven microservices by completely decoupling services from one another. With Confluent, organizations can rapidly build and deploy business applications with greater flexibility, support larger scale, and be more responsive to customer demands. But we don’t just talk about it, we do it ourselves as Confluent’s “Customer Zero”!

A good command line interface is essential for developer productivity. If you look at any of the major cloud providers, they all have a robust CLI API that enables you to achieve high productivity. The key benefits of a CLI include: Confluent offers a powerful CLI that lets you quickly create and manage Apache Kafka® clusters and Apache Flink® compute pools and all associated operations with both.

Released in December 2022, OAuth support on Confluent Cloud allows Confluent Cloud users to integrate their own third-party identity provider (IdP) with Confluent Cloud, centralizing account management across all of their cloud services. This article explains how to configure Azure Active Directory DS (Azure AD DS) and Confluent Cloud so that the Azure Directory can be used to authenticate and authorize applications to use Confluent Cloud clusters.

At Current 2023, we announced that Confluent Cloud is now up to 10x faster than Apache Kafka®, thanks to Kora, The Cloud-Native Kafka engine that powers Confluent Cloud. In this blog post, we will cover what that means in more depth.

Happy holidays from Confluent! It’s that time in the quarter again, when we get to share our latest and greatest features on Confluent Cloud. To start, we’re thrilled to share that Confluent ranked as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2023, and The Forrester Wave(™): Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023! Forrester strongly endorsed Confluent’s vision to transform data streaming platforms from a “nice-to-have” to a must-have.

Imagine easily enriching data streams and building stream processing applications in the cloud, without worrying about capacity planning, infrastructure and runtime upgrades, or performance monitoring. That's where our serverless Apache Flink® service comes in, as announced at this year’s Current | The Next Generation of Kafka Summit.

Apache Kafka® has become the de-facto standard for streaming data, helping companies deliver exceptional customer experiences, automate operations, and become software. As companies increase their use of real-time data, we have seen the proliferation of Kafka clusters within many enterprises. Often, siloed application and infrastructure teams set up and manage new clusters to solve new use cases as they arise.

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.