Hello,
Last month, we kicked off Project Metamorphosis to transform Apache Kafka® into the next-gen event streaming platform. As part of the project, we’re making monthly announcements on new product features and capabilities that support eight foundational traits of cloud-native data systems. We started things off by announcing a set of features that make Kafka more elastic, one of the most important traits of cloud-native data systems. This month, we’re focusing on another important trait of cloud-native data systems: cost-effectiveness.
Cost-Effective Apache Kafka
While no software offering can compete with the ROI of a fully managed cloud offering, many of the cost-saving components are available for self-managed Confluent Platform clusters.
Confluent Platform includes a number of essential features that make self-managed Kafka vastly more cost-effective than implementing with open source, both in terms of operations and development time as well as hardware costs.
Further, the global impact of the coronavirus pandemic has shifted the focus to the digital side of the business and has put pressure on organizational resources to deliver those services in a cost-effective way.
Here’s an overview of how the next generation of Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud™ supports cost-effectiveness:
Confluent Platform
100 + supported connectors – now available
Enables streamlined integration with other systems to produce and consume streams of events
Role-Based Access Control – now available
Makes it possible to share a cluster across many use cases while maintaining strict security to control data access.
Confluent Control Center – now available
Makes it easy to manage Kafka as well as the rest of Confluent Platform
Multi-region clusters – now available
Streamlines disaster recovery architectures by stretching a single Kafka cluster across datacenters, avoids complex recovery coordination with automated failover, and minimizes the cost of downtime and data loss with an active-active configuration
Tiered storage – now in preview
Reduces infrastructure costs by enabling Kafka brokers to offload older data to inexpensive object storage and minimizes over-provisioning by decoupling the compute and storage layers
Self-balancing clusters – coming soon
Fully automate partition rebalancing to optimize Kafka’s resource utilization, minimize over-provisioning, and eliminate complex manual operations
Confluent Cloud
QUADRUPLE THE FREE USAGE for new Cloud customers
To help companies struggling with costs, we’ve quadrupled the amount of free usage for new customers that sign up for Confluent Cloud. To redeem your $200 worth of usage, simply sign up below.
99.5% SLA on Basic – now available
We now offer a 99.5% uptime SLA on Basic clusters, providing even more reliability for developers looking to go to production with our scale-to-zero pricing.
Startup program for Y Combinator (current batch and alumni)
To help startups struggling with costs, we’re launching a start-up program offering $10K free usage toward Confluent Cloud for companies that qualify. Learn more here.
Fully-managed ksqlDB – now available
Fully-managed ksqlDB is now available for all Confluent Cloud customers to easily process streams of data. More details here.
Fully-managed connectors – now available
In the month of June, we will be releasing 4 new GA and 4 new preview connectors you can use to connect across the best-of-breed open source technologies and top cloud provider services. More details here.
For more information on these Confluent Platform features and to read about how Confluent Cloud can help your business reduce cost, check out the blog post:
Project Metamorphosis: Cost-Effective
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