Confluent Unveils First Commercial Product to Manage Kafka Clusters

Now Available in Confluent Enterprise 3.0, New Confluent Control Center Operationalizes Apache Kafka Throughout the Enterprise

PALO ALTO, Calif.—May 24, 2016—Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, today announced the general availability of Confluent Enterprise 3.0, featuring the company’s first commercial product. The new Confluent Control Center is designed to help data engineering teams operationalize Kafka throughout their organization. A comprehensive management system for Kafka clusters, Confluent Control Center is the first enterprise-class tool that delivers visibility and operational strength to managing a Kafka environment. It offers DevOps teams a powerful dashboard to configure Kafka Connect data pipelines, monitor and manage them from end-to-end, and effectively govern their growing ecosystem of stream data applications running on Kafka.

Confluent also announced open source Confluent Platform 3.0 featuring Kafka Streams, a powerful, lightweight solution to stream processing development. To learn more, please visit: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-simplifies-stream-processing-development-with-kafka-streams.

“Recognizing the massive opportunity that real-time data unlocks, businesses are quickly adopting Kafka to make their data instantly usable,” said Neha Narkhede, Confluent CTO and co-founder at Confluent, and one of the original creators of Apache Kafka. “Confluent is in the ideal position to help engineering teams operationalize Kafka across the business. Our developers have contributed more than 76 percent of all the open source Apache Kafka code, and we’ve built some of the largest production deployments in the world. We remain committed to supporting the open source core of Kafka as we introduce new products, services and features that give customers deeper visibility and control over their Kafka environment.”

Introducing Confluent Control Center—What Enterprises Need to Know

As Kafka has permeated the enterprise, the need to centralize and simplify management of its streams and clusters has become a huge opportunity for efficiency and extension of capabilities internally. Confluent Control Center will be the tool of choice to run Kafka across large-scale organizations.

Features include:

• Monitoring—Unlike other forms of monitoring, with Control Center operators can examine their data environment at the message level to understand message delivery, possible bottlenecks, and observe the end-to-end deliverability of messages in their native Kafka environment.
• Connector management—The Control Center UI allows operators to connect new data sources to the cluster and configure new data source connectors to meet their specific needs.

Industry Support for Apache Kafka and Confluent

As Fortune 500 companies tap into data streams for system monitoring, gather sensor data, and look to operationalize real-time business and customer insights, demand for Kafka is soaring. In a recent global survey of Kafka users, 65 percent of respondents said their organization plans to hire employees with Kafka skills in the next 12 months. Kafka is enjoying huge popularity among users. One hundred percent of survey respondents expressed satisfaction with Kafka, and 70 percent said they were ‘very satisfied’ or ‘completely satisfied’ with it. Users with enterprise support for Kafka were more likely to be enthusiastic about the results they were getting, with 92 percent very or completely satisfied.

“Companies seeking to build real-time applications are faced with complex architectural decisions involving many component technologies,” said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “The Confluent Platform starts with the popular Kafka messaging system and was designed to eliminate costly and labor-intensive data replications and to simplify the delivery of real-time data streams. It’s a new option that should be considered by any organization seeking a well-managed and unified approach to creating streaming data applications.”

“Companies today know they need to adopt Kafka in order to take advantage of real-time data and make smarter business decisions in the moment,” said Tobi Knaup, Co-Founder and CTO at Mesosphere. “We’re excited to partner with Confluent because its technology helps us deliver Kafka to our Datacenter Operating System customers, as well as to the open source DC/OS community, with all the features they need to adopt it easily and confidently.”

“Our customers are enthusiastically using Apache Kafka and stream processing to create better services and better experiences. Together, MongoDB and Confluent ensure our customers are able to deliver modern applications at scale and in real time,” said Kelly Stirman, VP of Strategy, MongoDB. “Data streams represent an important frontier in harnessing the power of data, and MongoDB and Kafka naturally complement one another to drive smarter, more contextual applications.”

“DataStax users have been clamoring for Kafka to take advantage of real-time data, and Confluent helps us deliver the features and services they need to make smarter business decisions in the moment,” said Barry Evans, Head of Technology Partner Development, DataStax. “Confluent makes Kafka and stream processing easy, and we’re excited to work together to help grow the Kafka ecosystem.”

Additional Resources:

For more details on Confluent Platform 3.0, click here: https://www.confluent.io/blog/announcing-apache-kafka-0.10-and-confluent-platform-3.0
For more details on Confluent Enterprise 3.0 and Confluent Control Center, click here: https://www.confluent.io/product/control-center
To learn more about Confluent Control Center, register for a free webinar here: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-control-center-webinar

About Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open source technology that acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. Apache Kafka is key data infrastructure that can serve as a single central nervous system, transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an organization.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache™ Kafka®, enables organizations to harness business value from stream data. Confluent Platform manages the barrage of stream data and makes it available throughout an organization. It provides various industries, from retail, logistics and manufacturing, to financial services and online social networking, a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline that enables applications ranging from large volume data integration to big data analysis with Hadoop to real-time stream processing. Backed by Benchmark, Data Collective, Index Ventures and LinkedIn, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform at www.confluent.io/download.