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Confluent Platform 7 extends event data streaming
The event data streaming vendor builds out hybrid event streaming deployment capabilities that can help organizations with data in the cloud and on premises.
Confluent today made generally available its Confluent Platform 7.0 release with the goal of linking on-premises and cloud event data streaming.
The vendor uses the open source Apache Kafka event streaming technology as the foundation for its platform. This has been a big year for the vendor, with its IPO in June as demand for its event data streaming technologies continues to grow.
Confluent Platform is the company's on-premises offering, while Confluent Cloud is the SaaS deployment. With the 7.0 update, Confluent is integrating Kafka 3.0 and enabling cluster linking across both on-premises and cloud platforms.
"The reality is that most organizations are likely to have hybrid and or multi-cloud information architectures," said David Menninger, an analyst at Ventana Research.
The hybrid reality of event data streaming
Menninger added that his firm's research shows that nearly two thirds (63%) of organizations have already adopted hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.
Unfortunately, most software vendors have done little to provide products that span these instances with knowledge about and integration with other instances, according to Menninger. He noted that generally, hybrid or multi-cloud means the same product can co-exist on premises and in various cloud providers’ platforms.
"Confluent has recognized the need to tie these instances together and treat them as one common platform," Menninger said.
Using Cluster Linking to enable hybrid event data streaming
Addison Huddy, director of product management at Confluent, said what the vendor calls Cluster Linking is now fully enabled in both the cloud and on-premises versions of Confluent.
Cluster Linking enables what Huddy referred to as a “bridge’ between on-premises and cloud environments, so data can move from one environment to the other as needed. Huddy noted that Cluster Linking uses Kafka's broker replication mechanism, the technology known has brokers that Kafka has long used to replicate data across its local nodes.
Huddy said that Confluent has taken its experience in building and deploying Kafka and enhanced broker replication to enable Cluster Linking that now works across both on-premises and cloud deployments."So it's the same data in two places that are being kept in sync, in real time," Huddy said. "We're making it so that our platform really runs anywhere and then everything can be linked together."
Confluent Control Center provides hybrid event data streaming visibility
Confluent Platform 7.0 also gets a new feature called Confluent Control Center that helps enable visibility and control over hybrid environments.
Confluent Cloud already has a dashboard that captures all the performance metrics about Confluent clusters that are running in the cloud. But Huddy noted that some organizations wanted the same visibility into their on-premises clusters.
With the Confluent Control Center, Huddy said users can now send metrics from on-premises deployment to the Confluent Cloud, which will monitor the metrics and provide visibility into any potential performance problems.
"We have customers that starting in the cloud, but the vast majority of companies out there, started their businesses by going and buying servers and renting some racks in a data center," Huddy said. "What we're finding is that these customers, they want to get to the cloud."
