“It was our first Kafka migration, and Confluent brought in the experience and structure we needed. They helped us map everything out—how to make it zero downtime, how to prepare our apps, even what metrics to monitor. That guidance made a huge difference.”
Ashish Kumar
Senior Software Engineer, Flix
Flix Needed to Hit the Brakes on Infrastructure Gridlock
Flix, the global travel-tech leader reinventing long-distance bus and train travel, had big plans for scaling its operations and expanding internationally. But as the company grew, so did the complexity of managing its self-hosted data infrastructure from its German headquarters. Burdened by operational overhead and bottlenecks that slowed feature development, the team realized that continuing to run open source Apache Kafka® in-house was no longer sustainable.
By partnering with Confluent, Flix offloaded the burden of managing Kafka, modernized its data platform, and dramatically accelerated its product development cycle—all while improving customer satisfaction through more real-time and reliable travel experiences.
Clearing Traffic on the Road to Real-Time Travel
As Flix scaled its routes across Europe, North America, South America, and India, real-time data became central to its success. The company relied on Kafka to connect dozens of applications and services powering critical use cases—from fraud detection to seat availability to arrival predictions. But as usage grew, so did the operational burden. Flix had more than 50 internal teams producing and consuming Kafka topics, often with tangled dependencies. Engineering teams were spending 60% of their time responding to bugs and managing infrastructure, including persistent inefficiencies in data flow that caused slowdowns in the ticket-booking system and customer service workflows.
“Our engineers were spending a lot of their time debugging and dealing with infrastructure maintenance,” said Ashish Kumar, Senior Software Engineer at Flix. “We wanted to free them to work on more critical projects and features that matter to our customers.”
Despite the best efforts of the engineering team, it became clear that self-managing Kafka would never be scalable long-term. They began evaluating solutions that could provide both a better developer experience and a foundation for global scale.
Next Stop: Streamlining Data at Scale with Confluent on AWS
Flix ultimately chose Confluent Cloud on AWS as the backbone of its real-time data infrastructure. Confluent’s fully managed data streaming platform provided the reliability, scale, and ease of use the team was looking for—without the operational complexity of open source Kafka.
With support from Confluent’s Professional Services team, Flix carried out a multi-phase, zero-downtime migration. Using Cluster Linking, they connected their existing systems to Confluent Cloud and created a phased plan to move teams over gradually with clear guidelines in place to support a smooth transition.
Flix also began leveraging Confluent’s data governance and Flink for stream processing, as well as managed connectors to push real-time data into Snowflake and Amazon S3—reducing delays from 8-12 hours to near real time. With these tools, the team could support data products more easily and start laying the groundwork for a broader data mesh architecture.
Key differentiators that led Flix to choose Confluent included:
Fully managed, cloud-native architecture
Streamlined plug-and-play experience that didn’t require heavy DevOps resources
Access to Kafka experts who provided strategic guidance during the migration
Built-in support for real-time data governance and stream processing
Confluent’s 99.99% uptime SLA (covering both infrastructure and software) compared to MSK’s 99.9%
Green Light for Innovation: 4-6x Faster Feature Delivery
The impact of Confluent has been transformative for Flix—both internally for teams and externally for customers.
Flix now delivers new features four to six times faster—from 4–6 months down to just one month. Additionally, 60% of engineering time that was once spent debugging infrastructure is now directed toward building new capabilities and data products that improve business outcomes.
“Our service desk requests have gone down by 80% since we moved to Confluent,” said Kumar. “That was a massive boost for us.”
The company also achieved:
10–15% cost reduction compared to running open source Kafka
Near real-time data movement into Snowflake and S3 (down from 8–12 hours)
Near real-time fraud detection for fare evasion, payment manipulation, and bots trying to buy up high-demand tickets
A more streamlined data mesh, with better flow and governance of data across teams
On the customer side, the results have been just as compelling. Ticket-booking speeds have improved and real-time seat availability updates help prevent double bookings. Travel updates and bus arrival predictions are more accurate and timely—making the journey more predictable and stress-free for passengers. Behind the scenes, Flix’s AI-driven systems now manage over 542 million seat combinations daily, 0.9 million rides per day, and re-optimize pricing for more than 47 million seats each day. These real-time insights are only possible because of a modern, reliable streaming infrastructure.
By investing in a data streaming platform, Flix has turned backend modernization into real improvements for passengers—reducing friction, boosting confidence, and delivering a more reliable travel experience.
Building the Future of Travel—Faster, Smarter, and More Global
Looking ahead, Flix is already expanding its use of Confluent to support more global scale and self-service innovation.
The company is exploring Tableflow in Confluent, which allows teams to move data between platforms with just a few clicks—without needing central engineering as the middleman. This will accelerate the company’s move toward an even more sophisticated data mesh and empower individual teams to build and deploy data products independently.
“We want to make it self-service,” Kumar explained. “If a team wants to move data to another platform, they can just do it themselves. That’s going to be huge for us.”
With Confluent, Flix has also been able to pull forward ambitious expansion plans. The company has launched new bus routes in Mexico this year, and what was once a five-year roadmap for multi-region operations is now possible in one to two years, thanks to the scalability and simplicity of its new data streaming platform.
By moving to Confluent, Flix didn’t just migrate technology - they accelerated how teams deliver, collaborate, and innovate across the business.
“The best part of Confluent isn’t just the tech,” said Kumar. “It’s the people. They’re like partners. When we have questions or new ideas, they’re always ready to help us move in the right direction.” Keep cruising, Flix!
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