Confluent Cloud For Apache Flink Now Available On AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure
The service enables efficient stream processing at scale, without the complexities of infrastructure management, according to Confluent.
Data streaming company Confluent has announced the general availability of Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink, a managed service that enables enterprises to process data in real-time and create reusable data streams for applications and analytics needs. The service is available across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Organisations today are looking to deliver enhanced customer experiences and streamline operations with use cases like fraud detection, predictive maintenance, and real-time inventory and supply chain management. Stream processing plays an important role by enabling organisations to act on data as it arrives, rather than waiting to process it in batches and use outdated data.
As the compute layer in the data streaming infrastructure, stream processing helps teams filter and join data in real-time to make it more usable for sharing with downstream applications and systems. It creates data streams that can be reused for multiple projects and provides agility, data consistency and cost savings as compared with traditional batch processing solutions, Confluent said.
According to the company, the service enables efficient stream processing at scale, without the complexities of infrastructure management. Flink and Apache Kafka, which are commonly used together for real-time data processing, will be available as a unified platform, with integrated monitoring, security and governance.
“A fully managed, unified Kafka and Flink platform with integrated monitoring, security and governance capabilities can provide organisations with a seamless and efficient way to ensure high-quality and consistent data streams to fuel real-time applications and use cases, while reducing operational burdens and costs,” said Stewart Bond, research vice president, data integration and data intelligence software at IDC.
According to Confluent, Flink enables organisations to build streaming data pipelines, event-driven applications and real-time analytics for use cases like personalised recommendations, dynamic pricing and anomaly detection. Streaming data pipelines supply real-time data across an organisation, including data warehouses, databases and data lakes. As generative AI gains prominence, vector databases must also be continuously updated with timely and well-curated data from streaming data pipelines.
Flink can trigger an alert when a particular event or pattern happens in event-driven applications, Confluent said. Unlike its batch counterparts, it can analyse real-time data streams to generate insights and help businesses accelerate decision-making.
“Stream processing allows organisations to transform raw streams of data into powerful insights. With Kafka and Flink fully integrated in a unified platform, Confluent removes the technical barriers and provides the necessary tools so organisations can focus on innovating instead of infrastructure management,” said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent.
