Confluent Unveils Apache Flink on Confluent Cloud, Making it Easier to Build Real-Time Applications with Stream Processing on a Unified Platform

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced the open preview of Apache Flink on Confluent Cloud, a fully managed service for stream processing that makes it easier for companies to filter, join, and enrich data streams with Flink. With data streams processed on the fly, organizations are able to react and innovate faster with timely insights. In addition, Confluent announced Data Portal to help teams discover all the real-time data streams within their organizations, Enterprise Clusters to cut Apache Kafka costs for serverless private networking, and reduced storage costs for Confluent Cloud.

Data streaming is a critical business requirement – 72% of IT leaders use it to power mission-critical systems, according to the 2023 Data Streaming report. But streaming data is only part of the puzzle. To derive the full value of data streams, organizations need to combine, enrich, and reshape those streams with other data from across their organization. In a data streaming platform, stream processing acts as the compute layer that turns data into valuable insights and action.

As one of the top projects of the Apache Software Foundation, Flink has emerged as the de facto standard for stream processing. Flink’s high performance, rich feature set, and robust developer community make it one of the most popular choices for large-scale, high throughput, and low-latency stream processing. Since Kafka has become the standard technology for data streaming, Flink is often used in tandem with Kafka to support companies’ mission-critical workloads.

“Companies globally are leveraging data streaming with Apache Kafka to power real-time experiences,” said Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent. “While data streaming connects data across an organization, stream processing tools like Apache Flink make it possible to act on that data in real time and accelerate the development of new use cases. Our managed Kafka and Flink offerings are like the peanut butter and jelly of data streaming. They work better together on a unified platform to connect and enrich data so teams can uncover more insights and deliver impactful experiences that move the needle.”