The Complete Solution for Cloud-Native Event Streaming

While open source Apache Kafka provides the technical foundation for collecting and processing real-time data streams, it doesn’t offer a simple solution for implementing business use cases fully end-to-end. Instead, enterprises attempt to solve this by custom coding or integrating several distributed systems together; these architectures often include one system for event capture, one for event storage, one for stream processing, and one traditional database for serving point-in-time queries. Even then, this doesn’t account for the wide range of capabilities needed for enterprise-wide event streaming. Confluent allows enterprises to:

• Freedom of choice to deploy Kafka how and where you want across different clouds or physical objects locations
• Easily scale and harness the power of event streaming across your entire business with elastic scalability, infinite storage, and global access
• Ensure events and users are safe and information is always available with enterprise-grade security and cloud-native reliability
• Democratize access to events for everyone with 120+ pre-built connectors, ksqlDB, and schema registry and validation

Problem: Stream processing requires development teams to adopt a sophisticated mental model and understand how to create “always-running” stream processing applications. Many times the logic will be complex or cumbersome to express in Java, deterring many development teams of taking advantage of stream processing. SQL, on the other hand, is a high-level language that is easier to write in because it is declarative. To help development teams take advantage of the power of stream processing, Confluent allows enterprises to:

• Easily create tables of state for events and run queries against them, by doing so, you ensure the tables of state can withstand fault
• Filter, transform, and aggregate data, including windowed aggregations, with ksqlDB
• Leverage the simplicity of SQL to democratize access to stream processing outside of Central IT and easily run Push queries that continuously look up data in tables, or classic Pull queries for point-in-time questions

Problem: Typically when moving data in and out of Kafka, development teams will need to either develop their own connectors using the Kafka Connect framework or leverage existing open source connectors already built by the community. The challenge is the time and effort required to build and maintain a new connector. On average, it takes 3-6 months for a FTE, who is a Kafka expert, to design, develop, test, and maintain one connector. And if something were to break, none of the connectors have support, so teams will spend more time fixing custom code than on innovation. Confluent allows enterprises to:

• Easily migrate data from legacy systems to modern applications by leveraging out-of-the-box certified connectors from a single marketplace
• Keep developers focused on building apps and lower your Kafka TCO by eliminating ~3-6 engineering months of designing and building a fully-managed connector
• Jumpstart IoT use cases with MQTT connectors and remove additional layers of complexity with MQTT Proxy’s Kafka-native connectivity