Why Data Streaming?

The term “streaming” is used to describe continuous, never-ending data streams with no beginning or end, that provide a constant feed of data that can be utilized/acted upon without needing to be downloaded first.

Similarly, data streams are generated by all types of sources, in various formats and volumes. From applications, networking devices, and server log files, to website activity, banking transactions, and location data, they can all be aggregated to seamlessly gather real-time information and analytics from a single source of truth.

While traditional solutions are built to ingest, process, and structure data before it can be acted upon, streaming data architecture adds the ability to consume, persist to storage, enrich, and analyse data in motion.

Stream processing systems bring real-time data and analytics to life. While there are use cases for data streaming in every industry, this ability to integrate, analyse, troubleshoot, and/or predict data in real-time, at massive scale, opens new use cases. Not only can organisations use past data or batch data in storage but gain valuable insights on data in motion.

Some real-life examples of streaming data include use cases in every industry, including real-time stock trades, up-to-the-minute retail inventory management, social media feeds, multiplayer game interactions, ride-sharing apps, Fraud detection, Machine Learning and AI.

Data in motion is a new paradigm that supports collecting a continuous flow of data throughout an organisation and processing it in real-time. Apache Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn by the founders of Confluent and is the industry standard infrastructure for setting data in motion and is used by organisations around the world to deliver exceptional customer experiences and data-driven, backend operations. Confluent Platform is an enterprise-ready platform that completes Kafka with advanced capabilities designed to help accelerate application development and connectivity, enable transformations through stream processing, simplify enterprise operations at scale and meet stringent architectural requirements.

You love Apache Kafka®, but not managing it. Confluent is cloud-native, complete, and fully managed service goes above & beyond Kafka so your best people can focus on delivering value to your business.

No more cluster sizing, over-provisioning, failover design, and infrastructure management. With 120+ connectors, stream processing, security & data governance, and global availability for all your data in motion needs with 99.99% uptime SLA combined with automatic patching and load balancing.

Confluent is so much more than Apache Kafka®

Used by over 70% of the Fortune 500, Apache Kafka has become the foundational platform for data in motion, but self-supporting the open-source project puts you in the business of managing low-level data infrastructure. That’s why modern businesses choose Confluent, so they can keep their focus where it matters. Confluent offers a more complete, cloud-native platform to set your data in motion, available everywhere your data and applications reside with Kafka at its core.

Confluent is the enterprise grade, secure, scalable and supported platform driven by Kafka®

1. Cloud Native: While Kafka is a powerful distributed system, modern enterprises do not want to be in the business of supporting the open-source distribution in-house. ZooKeeper needs to be managed, partitions rebalanced, failover and scaling processes designed — the list goes on. Confluent completely re-architected Kafka from the ground up to provide teams with a truly cloud-native experience that delivers an elastically scalable and globally available service ready to deploy, operate, and scale in a matter of minutes.

2. Complete: Kafka is a powerful platform, but it doesn’t offer everything you need out-of-the-box. With open-source Kafka alone, you’re on the hook to build and maintain foundational tooling and infrastructure, such as connectors, data governance and security, disaster recovery capabilities, and more. And when ready to deploy, the platform creates a significant ongoing operational burden — one that only grows over time. Your business has better things to do. Confluent provides a holistic set of enterprise-grade capabilities designed to eliminate the need to spend costly dev cycles building and maintaining tools, helping customers save up to 60% in TCO and quickly realize value from their real-time use cases.

3. Everywhere: Kafka helps to streamline digital architectures in real time, avoid complex point-to-point integrations, and break data silos. To truly meet that goal though, you need a solution that spans all your environments, both on-premises and across cloud providers. Confluent exists everywhere your applications and data reside, providing you the freedom to leverage a fully managed service on all leading public clouds and self-managed software you can deploy for on-premises workloads, whether on bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes. Best of all, you can seamlessly connect it all together in real time with Cluster Linking to create a consistent data layer across your entire business.

Confluent Features 

• Apache Kafka with Connect and Streams
• Multi-language Development
• Rich Pre-built Ecosystem
• Streaming Database: ksqlDB real-time stream processing and materialized views
• GUI-driven Management and Monitoring
• Flexible DevOps Automation
• Dynamic Performance and Elasticity
• Enterprise-grade Security
• Global Resilience
• Enterprise Support
  

Confluent Platform Architecture