Confluent and Microsoft Announce Strategic Alliance

Today, I am thrilled to announce a new strategic alliance with Microsoft to enable a seamless, integrated experience between Confluent Cloud and the Azure platform. This represents a significant milestone in our ongoing collaboration with the Microsoft engineering and product teams that deepens our strategic and technical alignment with the Microsoft ecosystem. We have made it even easier for Azure customers to accelerate their journey to the cloud with event streaming, Apache Kafka^®, and Confluent as the central nervous system of their business.

This alliance is also another milestone towards our vision of converging the many benefits of cloud computing with an open source system like Kafka. Last year, we solved a huge part of that puzzle with Project Metamorphosis and have set the bar for what customers can expect from an event streaming platform. Through this alliance with Microsoft, we’re extending all that really hard work to all Microsoft Azure customers. Now, large Kafka deployments that typically took teams of people months to build—Azure customers can get at the click of a button. They can even get started for free.

With Confluent Cloud as an integrated part of the Azure ecosystem, companies can leverage Kafka to quickly deliver real-time modern applications, providing the personalized, frictionless, enterprise-ready experience customers expect today.

Confluent Cloud on Azure enables companies to:

• Ingest and process streaming data, such as clickstreams, IoT device data, or logs, in real time
• Stream data into Azure data services for low-latency, real-time analytics with pre-built connectors to Azure Data Lake Gen 2, Databricks, Cosmos DB, and Azure Synapse for analytics
• Create a fabric for event streams that spans on-premises and cloud environments to enable modern cloud workloads to connect up to legacy systems
• Leverage machine learning models to get real-time insights from incoming data and share those insights with applications that can capture value from events in real time

The combination of fully managed Kafka in Confluent Cloud and the scalability and security of Azure will propel businesses forward in the ever-changing digital landscape. With Confluent Cloud integrated into the Azure Marketplace, signing up is seamless and billing is simple. All of your Confluent Cloud usage will apply to your existing Azure commitment with Microsoft.

To learn more, check out Microsoft’s announcement.

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