by Angela Guess

A recent press release states, “Confluent, provider of the leading streaming platform based on Apache Kafka™, today announced Confluent Cloud™, a fully managed streaming data service that unleashes developer velocity. With a simple, resilient, secure and performant service, developers can focus on what matters most: building revolutionary streaming applications with Apache Kafka, while the Confluent team handles Kafka operations. Confluent Platform is a more complete distribution of Apache Kafka intended for large-scale production 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 the introduction of Confluent Cloud, developers now 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.”

The release lists several key features: “Access to the Kafka Ecosystem – Unlike proprietary streaming services from cloud providers, Confluent Cloud offers the same open-source Apache Kafka APIs that developers are familiar with, making it easy to leverage clients, connectors and tools supported by the Kafka and Confluent communities. Cloud Optionality – In a recent survey of over 350 Apache Kafka users, 52% are using Kafka in the public cloud. In fact, nearly one-third (32%) of respondents who use Kafka in the cloud are running at least 6 applications with Kafka. Confluent Cloud is vendor agnostic, so you can “lift and shift” your Kafka infrastructure from any location into — or out of — any cloud. Unleash Developer Velocity – Confluent Cloud is a hosted streaming data service that unleashes developer productivity. It takes away the operational burden of running Kafka and lets developers focus on building streaming applications. Simple, resilient, secure and performant, teams can focus on what matters most – building the company.”

Read more at Business Wire.

Photo credit: Confluent