Confluent has solidified its position as the only company that offers both data streaming and stream processing for cloud and on-premises workloads, enabling businesses to derive value from their data more rapidly. The company also introduced WarpStream Orbit, a solution designed to simplify the migration to WarpStream’s “Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)” deployment model.
Stream processing is essential for businesses to process and analyze vast amounts of data in real time, facilitating key operations such as decision-making, fraud detection, and personalized customer experiences. Apache Flink, a leading open-source stream processing framework, has become the go-to solution for enterprises due to its superior performance, robust state management, and scalability for handling complex real-time analytics. However, teams often face challenges when managing Flink themselves, as it requires intricate setup, maintenance, and security of a distributed system. Organizations with on-premises workloads also need solutions that combine the advantages of cloud-native technologies with the flexibility of private infrastructure.
To address these challenges, Confluent launched the general availability of Confluent Platform for Apache Flink, which provides organizations with the tools to scale, secure, and manage stream processing for on-premises workloads. This enterprise-grade Flink distribution, combined with Confluent’s control plane, enables teams to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of Flink deployments. The platform streamlines deployment and scaling through automation, optimizes resource allocation, and ensures integrated security with unified access controls and consistent security policies across all systems. Additionally, Confluent’s Flink and Kafka experts offer consolidated support to help minimize risks and ensure seamless operations.
Numerous global companies have already reaped the benefits of using Confluent Platform for Apache Flink. For instance, a Fortune 50 telecom company utilizes the platform to perform real-time analytics on network performance, enhance personalized customer experiences, and gain network visibility for threat detection. By leveraging the platform, the telecom company has saved tens of millions of dollars, significantly reduced customer churn, and improved overall margins.
A standout feature of Confluent Platform for Apache Flink is the Confluent Manager for Apache Flink (CMF), which simplifies the deployment, updating, and scaling of Flink on-premises, making it as straightforward as in the cloud. CMF helps organizations streamline large-scale Flink deployments on Kubernetes, ensuring more efficient resource management and scaling. It also fosters better collaboration by centralizing management across the Confluent ecosystem, promoting consistency, and improving operational processes. Additionally, the platform enhances security by providing robust mechanisms for security management, ensuring compliance with internal policies.
Confluent’s announcement also highlights the importance of speeding up migrations to WarpStream, which is especially beneficial for customers with large-scale workloads and relaxed latency requirements who prefer to use their own virtual private cloud (VPC). Traditionally, migrating from open-source Kafka to a BYOC model has been complex and manual, requiring customers to navigate different Kafka environments and develop custom solutions, which increases time, costs, and potential data quality issues. WarpStream Orbit simplifies this migration process, allowing customers to seamlessly transition workloads from open-source Kafka or any Kafka-compatible service to WarpStream clusters.
Through WarpStream Orbit, customers can optimize their existing Kafka clusters by leveraging tiered storage to reduce costs while setting up disaster recovery for high-throughput, relaxed latency workloads. This solution accelerates the migration process and enables businesses to scale their operations with lower costs and improved reliability.