Confluent is a software company that provides a managed data streaming platform built around Apache Kafka, aimed at helping organizations move and process data in real time across their systems. It focuses on “data in motion,” enabling events (like customer actions, payments, sensor readings, or logs) to be published, consumed, processed, and integrated between many applications and data stores with low latency.
Core purpose
Confluent’s main goal is to make Kafka and streaming data easier to deploy, operate, and use at enterprise scale, both in the cloud (Confluent Cloud) and on premises (Confluent Platform). It turns Kafka into a more complete, managed data infrastructure layer, so teams can focus on building real‑time applications instead of managing low-level messaging infrastructure.
What Confluent offers
- Confluent Cloud: a fully managed Kafka-based streaming service available on major public clouds, with features for stream processing, security, and governance built in.
- Confluent Platform: a self-managed distribution of Kafka with extra enterprise features and tooling for security, monitoring, and easier operations.
- Ecosystem tools such as Kafka Connect connectors, Schema Registry, stream processing (e.g., Kafka Streams / Flink), and governance features to manage schemas, lineage, and access.
Typical use cases
Common use cases include real-time data pipelines between operational databases and analytics systems, event-driven microservices, log aggregation, fraud detection, personalization, and IoT data ingestion. Many large enterprises use Confluent to power always-on customer experiences and real- time backend operations, such as e-commerce recommendations or payment processing flows.
Relation to Apache Kafka
Confluent was founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka and commercially supports and extends Kafka. Kafka is the open-source engine for distributed event streaming, while Confluent packages, manages, and augments it with additional services and tools for production use.
