Confluent announced Confluent Platform 6.0 and the latest theme for Project Metamorphosis, Global. Confluent Platform 6.0 and Confluent Cloud also comes with a new capability, Cluster Linking, which makes event data globally available across a business, whether data is on-premises in different continents, spread among various cloud providers or spanning hybrid environments. Confluent Platform 6.0 also enhances Apache Kafka with greater elasticity, improved cost-effectiveness, and infinite data retention.
Cluster Linking
Cluster Linking allows organizations to have a simple and scalable way of connecting data between clouds and across hybrid architectures. With Cluster Linking, two or more Kafka clusters replicate data without the need for other components.
- Elastic – Self-Balancing Clusters automate partition rebalances to optimize Kafka’s throughput, accelerate broker scaling, and reduce the operational burden of running a large cluster. Without the hassle of manually rebalancing data, companies can focus more resources on building exceptional real-time experiences with less risk and effort.
- Cost-effective – ksqlDB will be generally available in Confluent Platform 6.0, replacing several tedious subsystems typically needed to build event streaming applications with a powerful event streaming database. Speeding up and simplifying the event streaming development process opens the potential for new, business-level use cases and massive operational efficiencies.
- Infinite retention – Tiered Storage enables businesses to retain infinite event data in Kafka and create a central nervous system for all events. With infinite retention, developers no longer have to worry about storage constraints when creating event streaming applications that leverage both real-time and past events, or training machine learning models using a historical stream of data.
Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent said,
“The data that today’s businesses are built on has become more distributed geographically and across different cloud environments, making it harder to bring together in a meaningful way. Event streaming has emerged as the platform that connects real-time data from every part of an organization for a company to act as one to build world-class applications.”