Confluent’s fully managed Apache Kafka service is now seamlessly embedded into the Azure platform with cloud-native capabilities.
Confluent, Inc., the event streaming pioneer, announced a new strategic alliance with Microsoft that establishes Confluent Cloud as a fully managed Apache Kafka® service directly available on Microsoft Azure. Through this alliance, Confluent and Microsoft are furthering their product collaboration and have released a new single sign-on capability from Azure Active Directory to Confluent Cloud that significantly streamlines the experience of getting started with event streaming. Azure customers can now access an extensive library of pre-built connectors, a unified billing model with options to use Azure committed spend on Confluent Cloud, and deeper integrations with Azure services. Now, organizations can leapfrog operational burdens of event streaming to build modern, real-time applications faster.
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As businesses shift away from 24-hour batch processing and move toward real-time event streaming, they face growing technical complexities around adopting, scaling, and maintaining Kafka. This often hinders them from having the infrastructure needed to support the modern, real-time applications their customers are demanding. With Confluent Cloud’s seamless integration on Azure, it’s now easier than ever to start using Kafka to stream events across Azure services to real-time power applications throughout a business.
“Real-time data is one of the biggest competitive advantages for modern businesses today, but also one of their biggest challenges, with data sprawling across so many different environments. Which is why we are pleased to work with Confluent to enable our mutual customers to quickly provision and manage Confluent resources within their familiar Azure environments through the all-new seamless integration service built on Microsoft Azure,” said Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Developer Division.
Today’s businesses are accelerating their data modernization efforts to meet demands for highly personalized, responsive, real-time applications. 80 per cent of the Fortune 100 have adopted Kafka, the de facto open-source event streaming platform, to power their real-time applications.
“Many organizations are undergoing rapid transformations to stay competitive in our increasingly digital world, and cloud and event streaming are playing critical roles in their success,” said Vinod Devan, VP and global head of ecosystems and business development, Confluent. “Through our strategic alliance with Microsoft, we ensure that Microsoft Azure customers can easily jumpstart event streaming and gain a high level of scalability, flexibility and agility needed for today’s winning applications.”
