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We are thrilled to announce that Confluent Cloud for Government is now available on the FedRAMP Marketplace with FedRAMP 20x Low authorization, allowing both private and public sector customers to leverage our cloud-native data streaming platform to power their mission-critical applications. This milestone marks the successful completion of Phase One of our FedRAMP 20x Pilot program.

In today’s cost-conscious climate, every line item on your cloud bill is under the microscope. That makes now the ideal time to rethink your data streaming strategy. For many teams, using a hyperscaler-hosted Apache Kafka service feels like the easy choice—one vendor, one bill, no additional contracts, and minimal setup. It makes sense early on, especially for small-scale projects or basic use cases. But, as your Kafka usage grows and becomes mission-critical, that simplicity comes at a cost.

The Apache Kafka community is proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 4.1.0. This blog post highlights the many new features and improvements included in this release. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes. Queues for Kafka (KIP-932) is now in preview. It's still not ready for production, but you can start evaluating and testing it. See the preview release notes for more details. This release also introduces a new Streams Rebalance Protocol (KIP-1071) in early access.

Based in Delhi, India, Vineet Singh has worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Confluent for the past three years, and he has contributed to various parts of Confluent’s core data streaming engine. Now he’s part of the team that makes Apache Kafka cloud-native, serverless, and able to power robust and scalable solutions for Confluent Cloud customers. Learn more about Vineet’s experience and growth at Confluent and how his team and environment have set him up for success.

Data streaming equips modern organizations to rapidly ingest and understand new information and use it to solve real-world problems at scale. For some of these real-time insights—critical operational cues that demand a timely response—delivering that information directly to your team’s inbox is the best way to act on it.

A data contract is a formal agreement between an upstream component and a downstream component on the structure and semantics of data that’s in motion. In a previous post, I showed how Confluent Schema Registry supports data contracts. By combining data contracts and encryption on streaming workloads, you can shift left the responsibility of data consistency, quality, and security to the producer, allowing the consumer to depend on a trustworthy stream of data.