Confluent makes the case for serverless Apache Kafka on its Cloud, not AWS

Virginia Backaitis
Digitizing Polaris
Published in
3 min readOct 1, 2019

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Developers who want to build cloud agnostic event-driven applications using Apache Kafka can try it out without spending a dime. That’s because Confluent, the commercial sponsor behind the popular open source project, introduced a free Kafka-as-a-Service tier in its cloud. The new tier provides up to $50 of service a month for up to three months.

“It’s another way to lower the barriers and lower the risk of starting up and experimenting with Kafka,” says Tony Baer, the founding principal of dbInsight LLC, which provides key strategic counsel to technology providers.

Apache Kafka is a distributed system for streaming data. “It collects data at scale and makes it available in real time. It also has a processing engine so that you can derive value,” says Confluent co-founder and Kafka co-creator Neha Narkhede. “It’s like a central nervous system for data,” she says. Companies like Walmart use it to power their real time inventory, grocery order and pickup system, Uber leverages it to match drivers with riders, Wall Street uses it for stock data.

At Kafka Summit, the company’s user conference taking place in San Francisco this week, Confluent co-founder and Jun Rao, told attendees that Apache Kafka is used by more than 100 thousand organizations and 60 percent of the Fortune 100. Confluent’s most active clients processes trillions of events per day and as many as 1000 brokers per cluster.

While companies with large IT teams, take Walmart or Uber for example, have large staffs of IT talent for ops and engineering on hand to scale and support Kafka internally, small and mid-sized companies may not.

That’s where Confluent Cloud comes in. It provides a serverless experience for Apache Kafka on the cloud of your choice, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS.)

Holger Mueller, senior vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research thinks that it’s the right move for Confluent to make.

“Enterprises fear the lock in from the established IaaS players when it comes to pre-built architectures, here streaming. At the same time they are concerned of having to maintain complex open source projects on IaaS…

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