Event streaming database ksqlDB and new connectors to modern infrastructures on Confluent Cloud drastically reduce resources and time needed to build event-driven applications

Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, announced its Cost Effective release as a part of Project Metamorphosis, the company’s initiative to build the next-generation event streaming platform that any organization can put at the heart of its business. Building on the foundation of last month’s Elastic Scaling release, Confluent is addressing the challenges of building, running, and scaling self-managed, event streaming applications cost-effectively and efficiently. The resources and time traditionally required to bring event-driven applications to market has been a barrier for many organizations to make event streaming pervasive within their business. To help companies overcome this hurdle, Confluent released new innovations in Confluent Cloud, the industry’s only fully managed, cloud-native Apache Kafka® service. The event streaming database ksqlDB is now generally available on Confluent Cloud. Confluent has also announced previews of fully managed Kafka connectors to leading open source infrastructures, such as MongoDB Atlas, Snowflake, and Elasticsearch Service.

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“Leading technology companies are no longer building out large teams to manage open source data systems,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent. “Increasingly, we see companies moving to best-of-breed cloud services like Confluent Cloud that provide the same capabilities, but faster, more reliably, and far more cost effectively. This frees up the best engineers to work on software and systems that differentiate a business and deliver greater value to customers.”

As the global economy continues to slow as a result of COVID-19, finding ways to save money and operate more efficiently have become more important than ever. However, as most businesses have moved nearly entirely online, they are in the incredibly difficult position of building sophisticated digital experiences that strengthen customer loyalty, while also reducing the cost of managing the complex infrastructure those applications rely on. Over 100,000 organizations use Kafka to enrich applications with real-time, contextual data; however, running highly distributed open source technology is especially costly and time-consuming. Oftentimes, developers and operators are stuck handling tedious cluster scaling, troubleshooting, and day-to-day management operations, rather than high-value projects that drive the business forward. The demands of managing Kafka infrastructure also slow down development cycles—Confluent found it can take up to two years for organizations to take event-driven applications to market.

“We used to host and manage Kafka ourselves, as the backbone of our real-time customer data platform, which is core to how Optimove identifies the optimal marketing campaign for each customer. With Confluent Cloud we’re seeing significant savings in administrative effort,” said Adam Abrams, Data Streaming Group Manager, Optimove. “In addition to increasing our focus on our core tasks, Confluent Cloud enabled us to set up multitenant clusters and better manage separate schema for our customers—and we’ll soon be taking advantage of the ability to easily scale up and scale down as needed.”

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To empower organizations to quickly build and iterate event-driven applications, Confluent has built new solutions in Confluent Cloud that drastically cut down the resources and manual effort needed. They join the suite of capabilities within Confluent Cloud that have helped companies reduce the cost of running self-managed Kafka by up to 60 percent.

The Easiest and Most Cost-Effective Way to Build Event Streaming Apps Is Now Available on Confluent Cloud

Last fall, Confluent unveiled ksqlDB to reduce the complexity and hassle of building event streaming applications with a preview of the industry’s first event streaming database. Today, ksqlDB is now generally available on Confluent’s fully managed Kafka service, Confluent Cloud. This powerful event streaming database replaces several tedious subsystems typically needed to build event streaming applications. Its lightweight, familiar SQL syntax makes it easy to continuously push real-time data updates to applications. With Confluent Cloud, ksqlDB can be easily deployed on any of the major cloud providers, speeding up and simplifying the event streaming development process to open potential for new, business-level use cases and massive operational efficiencies. Companies are already seeing how ksqlDB can modernize machine learning and implement real-time data replication with greater efficiency.

New Fully Managed Kafka Connectors Save Developers Time and Costs with Pre-Built Bridges to Mission-Critical Data Sources and Sinks

The ability to combine and analyze data from every part of a business is a major benefit of event streaming. However, the process of connecting to data sources that are spread out across on premises, multiple clouds, and a variety of other environments is time-consuming and difficult. The initial build, ongoing fixes, and maintenance for one manually built connector can take months.

To help Kafka developers be more productive, Confluent has worked closely with its technology partners to jointly build and maintain fully managed connectors. Confluent Cloud Connectors make moving data in and out of Kafka an effortless task. Today Confluent is announcing new and upcoming Confluent Cloud Connectors for:

• MongoDB, the leading modern database platform (source and sink preview available now) – MongoDB and Kafka make up the heart of many modern data architectures today. The new managed MongoDB Connector for Kafka makes it easier for events to flow between its global cloud database service MongoDB Atlas and Kafka topics in Confluent Cloud. This helps to accelerate the development of a wide range of use cases from event-driven architectures to microservices patterns.
• Cloud data platform Snowflake (sink preview available in June) – As a single integrated data platform, sending event data to Snowflake can power real-time cloud analytics and reporting.
• Distributed search engine and datastore Elasticsearch Service (sink preview available in June) – With minimum effort, organizations will be able to stream event data from Confluent Cloud to an Elasticsearch Service index for real-time log analysis or full-text search.

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