Confluent Launches Stream Governance Advanced to Safely Extend the Power of Data Streaming to Every Part of the Business

Enterprise-grade governance is now possible with point-in-time lineage insights, rich context cataloging, and globally available quality controls

Confluent’s Q4 ‘22 Launch also delivers Private Service Connect for Google Cloud

AUSTIN, Texas – October 4, 2022 – Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced a new tier of capabilities for Stream Governance, the industry’s only fully managed governance suite for Apache Kafka® and data in motion. With Stream Governance Advanced, organizations can resolve issues within complex pipelines easier with point-in-time lineage, discover and understand topics faster with business metadata, and enforce quality controls globally with Schema Registry. With more teams able to safely and confidently access data streams, organizations can build critical applications faster.

“Businesses heavily rely on real-time data to make fast and informed decisions, so it’s paramount that the right teams have quick access to trustworthy data,” said Chad Verbowski, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Confluent. “With Stream Governance, organizations can understand the full scope of streams flowing across their business so they can quickly leverage that data to power endless use cases.”

Stream Governance Advanced: Point-in-Time Lineage Insights, Sophisticated Data Cataloging, and Global Quality Controls

“SecurityScorecard observes over 180 billion signals a week to provide customers with 360-degree, real-time security prevention,” said Brandon Brown, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform, SecurityScorecard. “With Stream Governance, we have clear visibility into all our data, where we generate it, what it looks like, and how it has changed over time. We have confidence that our high-quality data is powering our business as we extend the use of data streaming across our entire organization. As more teams work with data streams and share their projects with others via object tagging and custom metadata details, the possibility of what we can build for our customers becomes incredibly exciting.”

Data streaming use cases are rapidly growing as real-time data powers more of the business. This has caused a proliferation of data that holds endless business value if teams are able to confidently share it across the organization. Building on the suite of features initially introduced with Stream Governance Essentials, Stream Governance Advanced delivers more ways to easily discover, understand, and trust data in motion. With scalable quality controls in place, organizations can democratize access to data streams across teams while achieving always-on data integrity and regulatory compliance.

New capabilities include:

• Point-in-time playbacks for Stream Lineage: Troubleshooting complex data streams is now faster and easier with the ability to understand where, when, and how data streams have changed over time. Point-in-time lineage provides a look back into a data stream’s history over a 24-hour period or within any one-hour window over a seven-day range. Teams can now see what happened on, for example, Thursday at 5pm, when support tickets started coming in. Paired with the new ability to search across lineage graphs for specific objects such as client IDs or topics, point-in-time lineage makes it easier to identify and resolve issues in order to keep mission-critical services up for customers and new projects on track for deployment.

• Business metadata for Stream Catalog: Improve data discovery with the ability to build more contextual, detail-rich catalogs of data streams. Alongside previously available tagging of objects, business metadata gives individual users the ability to add custom, open-form details represented as key-value pairs to entities they create such as topics. These details, from users who know the platform best, are critical to enabling self-service access to data for the larger organization. While tagging has allowed users to flag a topic as “sensitive,” business metadata allows that user to add more context, such as which team owns the topic, how it is being used, who to contact with questions about the data, or any other details necessary.

  Exploring the catalog is now even easier with GraphQL API, giving users a simple, declarative method to specify and get the exact data they need while enabling a better understanding of data relationships on the platform.

• Globally available Schema Registry for Stream Quality: By more than doubling the global availability of Schema Registry to 28 regions, teams have more flexibility to manage schemas directly alongside their Kafka clusters in order to maintain strict compliance requirements and data sovereignty. Additionally, Schema Registry is even more resilient with an increased 99.95% uptime SLA, giving businesses the confidence they need that quality controls for Kafka will always be in place as more groups start working with the technology.

Confluent Q4 ‘22 Launch Expands Support for Private Networking

Confluent’s quarterly launch announcements provide an easy way to get up to speed on new innovations that are now available. In addition to Stream Governance Advanced, this quarter’s highlights include:

Private Service Connect for Google Cloud delivers a simple and secure connection from a Google Cloud virtual private cloud (VPC) to Confluent Cloud. This highly secure private networking setup minimizes the complexity and burden of manually connecting virtual networks in the public cloud while keeping all details about a customer’s network private. Now, Confluent Cloud supports private endpoints across all three major cloud service providers, including AWS Private Link and Azure Private Link.

Additional Resources

• To see all the new innovations the Confluent Q4 ‘22 Launch, check out this blog post: https://www.confluent.io/blog/new-confluent-cloud-features-stream-designer-governance-and-more/
• For deep dives into each feature, register for the upcoming Confluent Q4 ‘22 Launch webinar: https://www.confluent.io/resources/online-talk/demo-webinar-stream-designer-stream-governance-advanced-and-more/
• See how Confluent is helping its customers transform their businesses: https://www.confluent.io/customers/
• Join Confluent and apply for one of its open positions: https://www.confluent.io/careers/

About Confluent

Confluent is the data streaming platform that is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure that sets data in motion. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion—designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich, digital front-end customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven backend operations. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io.

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services, features, and functions that are currently available.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

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