Confluent Announces Partnership with Google Cloud to Deliver a Platform for Building Event-driven Applications

Confluent Cloud, now available on Google Cloud Platform, combines its streaming data service based on Apache Kafka® with Google Cloud solutions

Palo Alto, Calif. – May 22, 2018 – Confluent, provider of a streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced a partnership with Google Cloud to make Confluent Cloud available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for mission-critical use cases, including event-driven applications, machine learning for advanced analytics, and hybrid cloud data pipelines. By using a fully-managed streaming data service on GCP, customers can offload the operating burden of Apache Kafka and stream data at scale, in real time, to Google Cloud big data services including BigQuery, Cloud Machine Learning Engine and TensorFlow. This enables enterprises and developers to focus on generating faster and better business insights instead of managing infrastructure.

With Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Platform, enterprises can operationalize streaming data by:

• Building event-driven applications – productize Confluent Platform for event-driven applications by combining Confluent Cloud streaming services with Google Cloud solutions, including Cloud Functions, App Engine and Kubernetes.
• Unleashing developer velocity – enable Kafka developers to start building applications on Google Cloud in minutes, without the operational burden of managing Kafka clusters.
• Providing a persistent bridge to cloud – build a real-time data pipeline between data centers and Google Cloud, and accelerate multi-cloud adoption by making data reliably available across any cloud.
• Analyzing data at massive scale – use Confluent Cloud to stream data at scale and in real time to Google Cloud’s big data solutions, including BigQuery, Cloud Machine Learning Engine and TensorFlow.

With Confluent Cloud, enterprises and developers have the option to build and run applications in the cloud, knowing that the team who originally created Kafka are maintaining and managing the Kafka clusters. In addition to the partnership with Google Cloud, Confluent now has two subscription options available:

• Confluent Cloud Enterprise – a subscription to the streaming data service for all applications, from development to production with full enterprise capabilities such as SLAs, security and VPC peering to connect to infrastructure while running highly-scaled, real-time applications and pipelines.
• Confluent Cloud Professional – a subscription to the streaming data service to meet the needs of projects under development as well as smaller organizations and applications. It offers the low latency of Kafka and automatic upgrades, among other features to accelerate Kafka application development and allows developers to be up and running in minutes using a self-serve provisioning model.

“By partnering with Google Cloud, we’re giving our mutual customers a new way to leverage a fast and reliable streaming data service based on Apache Kafka on the Google Cloud Platform,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluent. “We’re also excited to introduce Confluent Cloud Professional to make it possible for cloud-first developers and enterprises to build Kafka-based, event-driven applications on the cloud of their choice, at whatever level they need.”

“We’re finding an increasing number of customers looking for streaming solutions to power their applications. Those using Apache Kafka have asked for a managed Kafka solution that matches the ease of use of Google Cloud’s broader data services,” said Sudhir Hasbe, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud. “Our partnership with Confluent will give customers access to an enterprise-grade managed Kafka experience, and with that the ability to build hybrid and cloud-native streaming solutions with their preferred tools.”

Pricing and Availability

• Confluent Cloud Professional is in Limited Availability on Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Pricing is based on hours of provisioned capacity and billed on usage at the end of the month.
• Confluent Cloud Enterprise is in Limited Availability on Google Cloud and General Availability on Amazon Web Services. Contact Confluent for pricing details: https://www.confluent.io/cloud-enterprise/request-a-quote.

Resources

• Learn more about Confluent Cloud here: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/.
• Read the Confluent blog post: https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-cloud-pro-gcp/.
• Read the Google blog post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2018/05/google-cloud-platform-and-confluent-partner-to-deliver-a-managed-apache-kafka-service.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, provides the leading streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. With a streaming platform that spans to the edges of an organization and captures data into streams of real-time events, businesses in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media are able to respond in real time to every customer event, transaction, user experience and market movement whether on premises or in the cloud. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Open Source at www.confluent.io/download.

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© Confluent, Inc. 2014–2018. All rights reserved. Apache, Apache Kafka and Kafka are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. All other marks used are the property of their respective owners.