Learn how to make Apache Kafka^® Cost Effective

Building the right data architecture for every use case, especially with complex distributed systems like open source Apache Kafka, is expensive and time consuming. Developers and IT organizations are unable to move quickly to get apps to market, especially smaller organizations or individuals with limited resources.

Confluent's event streaming solutions allow you to:

• Operate more efficiently using Confluent Cloud's fully-managed event streaming platform and unparalleled Kafka expertise
  • Eliminate operational costs by completely offloading the management burden of Apache Kafka to a fully-managed service.
  • Take advantage of paying only for what you use and Confluent Cloud's economies of scale to reduce hardware costs and convert CAPEX to OPEX.
  • Reduce downtime and associated revenue loss, troubleshooting time, brand damage, and customer churn with our guaranteed 99.95 uptime SLA, and in-place Kafka bug fixes.
  • Quickly tackle any Kafka problem and unblock any issue using Confluent's committer-driven support team with over 1 million hours in Kafka expertise.
• Free up your best people to work on the critical projects that drive competitive advantage and revenue
  • Confluent Cloud is a fully-managed service - you don't need anyone to install, maintain or upgrade hardware
  • Developers stay focused on building apps, not managing large scale distributed infrastructure
• Improve the efficiency of self-managed Kafka clusters by reducing infrastructure and operational costs with existing and soon-to-be-released features of Confluent Platform
  • Significantly reduce storage costs by offloading older data to cheaper object storage using Tiered Storage (preview). Minimize overprovisioning by decoupling the compute and storage, enabling you to scale them independently.
  • Fully automate partition rebalancing to optimize Kafka's resource utilization, minimize overprovisioning and eliminate complex manual operations using Self-balancing Clusters (coming soon).
  • Streamline the DR architecture by stretching a single Kafka cluster across data centers, avoid complex recovery coordination with automated failover, and minimize costly downtime and data loss with Multi-region Clusters (available).
  • Centralize multi-cluster management and monitoring, and adhere to established event streaming SLAs with Control Center (available).

• Increase speed to market by streaming data through Kafka the day you sign up with Confluent Cloud
  • Don't waste 9 months trying to find the resources and build out your Kafka architecture
  • Start app development within a week, and keep it the focus from start to finish
• Increase operational and developer efficiency with a complete solution to event streaming - not just Kafka ingest
  • No need to invest in additional systems or infrastructure to process streams, connect to sources and sinks, or secure data.
  • Ensure enterprise reliability and avoid wasting valuable development cycles building connectors or maintaining community-sourced ones
  • Easily access and experiment with the new features and updates regularly released into Confluent Cloud.
• Accelerate time to market by automating self-managed Kafka deployment and key lifecycle operations on Kubernetes with Confluent Operator
  • Reallocate DevOps resources to high-value projects
  • Remove the need of deploying components of an event streaming platform in a bespoke, one-by-one manner

OSS Apache Kafka or partially-managed Kafka services are expensive to deploy and costly to manage. Plus, the price gets out of control fast, especially as the number of apps being built and the data required to support them scales up massively. Smaller organizations or individuals don't have the resources to get started, and larger organizations see their costs go up quickly as Kafka scales.

Confluent's complete event streaming platform lets you:

• Get started for free and leverage 4x the free credits now available in Confluent Cloud!
• Pay only for data streamed with scale-to-zero pricing using our Basic clusters, which now come with 99.5% uptime SLA
• Leverage flexible, usage-based, commitment models for significant discounts across the entire solution that accommodate your budget and scale as your usage of Confluent Cloud grows
• Starting this month, we're excited to announce a brand new startup program, beginning with Y Combinator, to provide startups $10,000 of free credits to use in Confluent Cloud
• Get started on Confluent Platform with our Basics tier and get access to Control Center, Security fundamentals, Schema Registry, ksqlDB, and more, all supported by the world's foremost Kafka experts