A Reliable Platform for Processing Streaming Data in Real-Time: Confluent

The Silicon Review

As data proliferates across business types, event streaming is becoming ever more important. But what is event streaming? A simple way to think about it is that event streaming enables companies to analyze data that pertains to an event and respond to that event in real time. Currently, in all markets, everything is being driven by events and with customers looking for responsive experiences when they interact with companies there is a need to make real-time decisions based on an event becomes critical.

Apache Kafka is a distributed data store optimized for ingesting and processing streaming data in real-time. Streaming data is data that is continuously generated by thousands of data sources, which typically send the data records in simultaneously. A streaming platform needs to handle this constant influx of data, and process the data sequentially and incrementally. Founded by the team that built Apache Kafka, Confluent builds an event streaming platform that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams. Every byte of data has a story to tell, something of significance that will inform the next thing to be done. In a data-driven enterprise, how we move our data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. With greater speed and agility, data’s value increases exponentially.

Streaming Platform

Today, data is locked up in systems that don't talk to each other. Companies want a single, real-time source of truth about your business that reaches the very end points of your organization: a central nervous system that enables you to react as events arrives, turning inaccessible systems inside out. Confluent Platform adds administration, data management, operations tools and robust testing to your Kafka environment, making it the source of truth to identify any potential threat.Whether for cost or performance, architecture based on a highly scalable, distributed event streaming platform like Confluent will grow quickly with your business and the expanding data pipelines that come with it, accelerating both performance and cost savings.

Confluent platform

Confluent provides the industry’s only enterprise-ready Event Streaming Platform, driving a new paradigm for application and data infrastructure. With Confluent Platform you can leverage data as a continually updating stream of events rather than as discrete snapshots. Over 60% of the Fortune 100 leverage event streaming – and the majority of those leverage Confluent Platform. Confluent provides a single platform for real-time and historical events, enabling you to build an entirely new category of event-driven applications and gain a universal event pipeline. Confluent is founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka.Confluent Platform makes it easy to build real-time data pipelines and streaming applications by integrating data from multiple sources and locations into a single, central Event Streaming Platform for your company. Confluent Platform lets you focus on how to derive business value from your data rather than worrying about the underlying mechanics such as how data is being transported or massaged between various systems. Specifically, Confluent Platform simplifies connecting data sources to Kafka, building applications with Kafka, as well as securing, monitoring, and managing your Kafka infrastructure.

Confluent KSQL

Confluent KSQL is the streaming SQL engine that enables real-time data processing against Apache Kafka^®. It provides an easy-to-use, yet powerful interactive SQL interface for stream processing on Kafka, without the need to write code in a programming language such as Java or Python. KSQL is scalable, elastic, fault-tolerant, and it supports a wide range of streaming operations, including data filtering, transformations, aggregations, joins, windowing, and sessionization. Apache Kafka is a popular choice for powering data pipelines. KSQL makes it simple to transform data within the pipeline, readying messages to cleanly land in another system.KSQL is a good fit for identifying patterns or anomalies on real-time data. By processing the stream as data arrives you can identify and properly surface out of the ordinary events with millisecond latency.Kafka’s ability to provide scalable ordered messages with stream processing make it a common solution for log data monitoring and alerting. KSQL lends a familiar syntax for tracking, understanding, and managing alerts.

Amazon Web Services Cloud Deployment

Deploying Kafka to AWS is becoming increasingly popular as enterprises default to cloud for their platforms or look to a hybrid on-premises & cloud approach. Within AWS, there are many different permutations for the compute, storage and networking layers, which can all have an effect on the performance and operational characteristics of your clusters. This engagement will provide a Confluent Kafka expert to work alongside your technical teams to assess an upcoming Kafka & Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud deployment. They will assess design trade-offs, share known best practices, and provide the recommendations to your team, based on our own testing and knowledge taken from other existing deployments.

Confluent Cloud

Confluent Cloud is a resilient, scalable streaming data service based on Apache Kafka^®, delivered as a fully managed service. Confluent Cloud has a web interface and local command line interface. You can manage cluster resources, settings, and billing with the web interface. You can use Confluent Cloud CLI to create and manage Kafka topics.

Jay Kreps, Co-founder and CEO at Confluent

Prior to founding Confluent, he was the lead architect for data infrastructure at LinkedIn. He is among the original authors of several open source projects including Project Voldemort (a key-value store), Apache Kafka (a distributed streaming platform) and Apache Samza (a stream processing system).