Confluent achieves 6X growth in number of customers on Confluent Cloud as more organizations seek to remove the operational burdens and complexity of scaling Apache Kafka infrastructure
Mountain View, Calif. – November 13, 2019 – Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, today announced major milestones for its fully managed Apache Kafka® streaming service – Confluent Cloud. Founded by the original creators of Kafka, Confluent has been relentless in the pursuit to provide organizations with the quickest, simplest way to harness the power of real-time event streaming. With Confluent Cloud, DevOps and IT teams bypass the hassles of managing and provisioning Kafka clusters, enabling them to focus more energy on building apps, not infrastructure. As a result, Confluent has seen 6X growth in the number of Confluent Cloud customers over the past year.
“From ride sharing applications to instant fraud detection, Kafka has been a foundational technology in enabling real-time products and experiences that weren’t previously possible,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and chief product officer, Confluent. “With Confluent Cloud, we’re seeing teams leapfrog months of effort that would have been spent operating and managing Kafka, and getting straight to adding value to their customers. By offering an easy and fully automated way to use Kafka, event streaming is now an option regardless of a team’s size, expertise or budget.”
Over the past year, Confluent made significant strides in its mission of lowering the barrier for organizations to build resilient, secure and performant event streaming applications. As access to real-time data becomes a critical competitive advantage in today’s on-demand society, more businesses are turning to Kafka as the de facto open source software for real-time, event streaming. However, the cost and time needed to operate Kafka quickly escalates as it scales and enters production environments, making it difficult for many organizations to get started.
“The event stream processing space is quickly heating up as rapid and continuous delivery of data and simplification of highly distributed data sources become more critical to forward-thinking organizations,” said Maureen Fleming, vice president of intelligent process automation, IDC. “Apache Kafka is commonly used as the entryway to event streaming but is difficult to manage as projects scale. Simplifying event streaming means that the value of fast insights and actions are delivered more rapidly, and widespread adoption becomes feasible.”
Taking into account common challenges, Confluent Cloud focused its new innovations on three key pillars:
Cloud-native Scalability and Elasticity
Organizations preparing for future growth are in a constant gamble with cloud capacity planning, running the risk of either wasting money on unused resources or facing poor performance because of lack of resources. To remove the guesswork around cloud optimization, Confluent introduced the industry’s first cloud-native experience for Kafka. It’s now possible to dynamically scale from 0 to 100 Mbps and scale back down in seconds, so capacity planning becomes a thing of the past. And, organizations can start small and pay for only what is actually streamed. Confluent is the first and only Kafka service to offer consumption-based pricing with this level of unparalleled elasticity.
Freedom to Choose How and Where to Deploy
To quickly answer shifting business priorities and customer demands, the ability to move freely between cloud vendors and a varying mix of hybrid and on-premise environments is a must. With the introduction of Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure, Confluent’s fully managed Kafka experience is available across the three major cloud providers, including Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. And, to ensure teams can quickly connect to popular data sources and sinks without having to write custom code, Confluent is announcing the general availability of its fully managed Amazon S3 connector, and previews of fully managed Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage connectors. These will help build seamless event streaming pipelines for accelerated hybrid and multi-cloud adoption.
Mission-critical Reliability
For organizations managing security-sensitive and mission-critical workloads, Confluent has newly released functionality around securing data transfers and data access. With the latest in Confluent Cloud, organizations have Access Control Lists that provide granular control to topics to secure access to data. Confluent has also enabled more private networking options with the ability to peer to multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), and use transit gateway to support hybrid cloud architectures. This makes building a secure bridge across VPCs and on-premises networks easy to manage, even for organizations with the most stringent enterprise-grade security and networking needs.
Customer Perspective
A wide range of organizations, from agile startups to large enterprises, depend on Confluent Cloud to support critical use cases. Because of its high level of security, scalability and elasticity, Confluent Cloud is able to support IT leaders and DevOps practitioners spanning development and production stages.
“Confluent Cloud and Kafka are the heart of all our projects, serving as a backend for new mobile apps and for collecting data from assembly lines and legacy systems,” said Ralph Debusmann, solution architect, Bosch Power Tools BDO Digital Offerings, in a Confluent case study. “From the start, we were interested in not just streaming data once, but also being able to replay it. With Confluent Cloud and Kafka, we have a single source of truth, where we can keep data indefinitely. More importantly, we can now build new applications on top of our event streams — as often as we want and as many as we want.”
“We truly think of Confluent Cloud and Kafka as the central nervous system of our business, spanning everything from the customer facing applications to distribution center operations,” said Chirag Dadia, director of engineering, Nuuly. ”Confluent is a trusted partner that helps us ensure our Kafka cluster is going to keep running smoothly and operating as it is supposed to. If we had to manage everything ourselves, our team would have to be much larger to keep the systems up and running.”
“The scale and robustness of the system we’ve built with Confluent Cloud plays a key role in achieving our mission of accelerating the discovery of novel treatments for patients,” said Ben Mabey, VP of engineering, Recursion Pharmaceuticals. “Having Confluent Cloud as the flexible and reliable backbone of our systems has improved our operations substantially and we would recommend Confluent Cloud to anyone looking to do just that.”
Industry Perspective
The industry has taken notice of Confluent Cloud’s benefits. Confluent was one of the top 10 in Forbes Cloud 100, the definitive ranking of the top private cloud companies in the world. Also, Google awarded Confluent Technology Partner of the Year Award for Data and Analytics for its achievements in helping joint customers build mission-critical use cases.
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About Confluent
Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, Confluent is headquartered in Palo Alto and London with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download.
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