Confluent Platform 3.0 Now Available

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 24 — Confluent, founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, today announced the general availability of open source Confluent Platform 3.0. The new release introduces Kafka Streams, a powerful, lightweight solution to real-time processing designed to power a generation of highly responsive applications. With Kafka Streams, developers can quickly build core streaming applications such as fraud and security monitoring, Internet of Things (IoT) operations and machine monitoring, with concise code that is distributed and reliable.

Confluent Platform 3.0 also features Confluent’s first commercial product, the Confluent Control Center, that operationalizes Kafka across an organization, also announced today. To learn more, please visit:
http://www.confluent.io/confluent-unveils-first-commercial-product-to-manage-kafka-clusters.

Businesses are just beginning to recognize the sea change that real time data is bringing to organizational performance. With the proliferation of mobile devices and applications, a growing volume of Web application data, and the emergence of IoT as a competitive differentiator, data is increasingly taking the form of real-time streams. The faster companies respond to data, the better they can personalize services and offerings based on real-time customer engagement, react to shifting market dynamics and accelerate their business operations to outperform the competition.

“Data has a shelf life of value, and today’s consumers and business users demand immediate, highly personalized, responsive information,” said Neha Narkhede, cofounder and CTO of Confluent, and one of the creators of Kafka. “Stream data is becoming an organization’s customer interface backbone, fostering true customer intimacy that enables differentiation from competitors. Based on our Kafka expertise we’ve created a powerful, lightweight approach to stream processing.”

Introducing Kafka Steams — What Developers Need to Know

A simple solution to real-time processing, Kafka Streams is a stream processing layer that provides a new, native streaming development environment for Kafka. Developers will be able to leverage an easy-to-use library for building distributed stream processing apps using Kafka.

Kafka Streams is:

• Powerful — Supports stateful and stateless processing; distributed processing and fault tolerant; no downtime rolling deployments
• Lightweight — No dedicated cluster required; no message translation layer; no external dependencies
• Real-Time — Allows for late arrival of data; processes one event at a time; doesn’t microbatch messages like other stream processing solutions; windowing with out-of-order data

About Confluent Platform

The Confluent Platform is an open source platform that contains all the components required to create a scalable data platform built around Apache Kafka. These components draw on Confluent’s experience building some of the largest streaming data pipelines in the world. For more information, please visit: http://www.confluent.io/product.

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 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.

Source: Confluent