Introducing Confluent Private Cloud: Cloud-Level Agility for Your Private Infrastructure

If you’re on a platform team running Apache Kafka®, you know it’s rarely simple. You’re expected to keep it stable, performant, and secure while juggling requests from every direction. Supporting multiple teams and partners leads to operational complexity that never really goes away. Tuning for performance and security across fragmented environments doesn’t scale, and enforcing governance means asking developers to update their own code—slowing down everyone and making change management a constant headache.

As demand grows, so do the challenges. Performance bottlenecks creep in, noisy neighbor issues start to surface, and tracking usage for things like chargebacks or internal billing becomes a spreadsheet nightmare. Meanwhile, you’re stuck between two worlds: The business wants the speed and automation of the cloud, but regulations or data residency requirements keep everything on-premises.

We believe platform teams deserve better. Today, we’re excited to introduce Confluent Private Cloud, a new deployment model for platform teams in large, regulated organizations or service providers operating Kafka at scale across multiple lines of business, developer teams, or clients.

Bringing Our Lessons From Kora to Private Environments

For years, we’ve been running Confluent Cloud, our fully managed cloud service, at a massive scale. Kora, the engine behind Confluent Cloud, significantly re-architects Apache Kafka to provide the high availability, scalability, elasticity, and cost-efficiency required for a multi-tenant, cloud-based service. Kora fundamentally changes the game in the cloud. It eliminates the need for over-provisioning, thanks to automatic, elastic scaling, and delivers 10x lower latency—improving price performance while supporting thousands of tenants with strong isolation.

This investment has paid off. We’ve been able to reduce infrastructure and operations costs by up to 50%—and we get to pass that savings on to you. Confluent Cloud is the lowest-cost solution on the market, and we guarantee that we'll beat your cloud provider's Kafka price.

At the same time, Confluent Platform has become the trusted, self-managed standard for data streaming, giving thousands of organizations the control and enterprise-grade features they need in their own data centers.

Now we’re bringing these proven, cloud-native operational efficiencies to your private infrastructure without sacrificing the security and control you expect from Confluent Platform. It’s the best of both worlds: the reliability and features you trust, now paired with the automation and efficiency we’ve battle-tested in the cloud. 

The result is Confluent Private Cloud, a platform that helps you get more out of your hardware, reduce manual toil, and run Kafka at scale without giving up control. The outcomes are similar to what we’ve achieved in our cloud: You can reduce your overall Kafka infrastructure and operating costs by up to 50%.

What Is Confluent Private Cloud?

Confluent Private Cloud is designed to bring the operational advantages of cloud-native Kafka to your own infrastructure without forcing you to compromise on control or compliance. It’s a complete platform designed to solve the biggest challenges of running a private, multi-tenant service—whether for internal lines of business, self-service developer teams, or end customers.

Confluent Private Cloud builds on the battle-tested foundation of Confluent Platform, layering in automation, governance, and performance features straight from our cloud stack. The result: the building blocks for a private data streaming environment with the efficiency of a cloud service.

“The need for real-time data has continued to grow, but privacy and compliance requirements remain a major challenge to scaling it. Businesses must look for solutions that help them strike a balance between delivering a fast self-service experience like a cloud provider and maintaining centralized control of their private infrastructure. With the right strategy, teams can move quickly and confidently, whether their data is in the cloud or on-prem.”

— Stewart Bond, Vice President of Data Intelligence and Integration Software at IDC

With Confluent Private Cloud, you can:

• Accelerate Kafka performance at scale with Intelligent Replication. Deliver consistent low-latency and high-throughput streaming as your workloads and partition counts grow.

• Centralize governance, access, and policy enforcement with Confluent Private Cloud Gateway. Route, secure, and migrate applications without asking developers to update their code.

• Govern data streams consistently across both on-prem and cloud environments with Unified Stream Manager (USM). Manage hybrid compliance and troubleshooting from a single interface.

With Confluent Private Cloud, you’re not just wrangling clusters anymore. You’re running Kafka-as-a-service for your whole organization, ready to scale and support multiple application teams and diverse workloads.

How It Works: A Quick Look Under the Hood

So how does it work? Confluent Private Cloud introduces a new operational model centered on a control plane that automates the life cycle of your data streaming infrastructure.

This first release is packed with features that address the biggest operational headaches for platform teams: client management, performance, and governance.

Centralized Control and Zero Client Drama With Confluent Private Cloud Gateway

Managing security, migrations, and policy enforcement is tough when you don’t control the client code. Every change—whether it’s a cluster migration, disaster recovery drill, or new security requirement—usually means chasing down dozens of app teams, coordinating updates, and hoping nothing gets missed.

The Confluent Private Cloud Gateway acts as a smart, protocol-aware proxy between your clients and Kafka clusters, giving you a single, stable entry point for all client traffic. Instead of connecting directly to brokers, clients hit a stable endpoint on the Gateway. It understands the Kafka protocol and routes traffic based on your policies—making the backend invisible to the client.

This centralizes authentication, authorization, and encryption at the platform level, so you can enforce security policies and update access controls without asking developers to change their client code. That means when your clusters change, your clients don’t. Here’s what that makes possible:

• Onboarding new client workloads is faster. Spend less time educating and policing app developers on best practices for failover and resource usage.

• Migrating workloads is easy between clusters. Just update a routing rule on the gateway—no need to coordinate with every app team.

• Disaster recovery and failover events are handled centrally. No more scrambling to update and restart clients across the organization.

• Meet internal client policies by design. Reduce custom code, limit continuous integration/continuous deployment reviews, and eliminate one-off clusters just to stay compliant.

The operational savings are tangible. By cutting out much of the manual coordination and custom tooling, you get time back to deliver new features instead of chasing down app teams or firefighting config changes. With less friction and fewer moving parts, your total cost of ownership drops right alongside your day-to-day operational overhead.

Scale Your Clusters, Not Your Hardware Bill With Intelligent Replication

Scaling Kafka in a private environment usually means hitting hard limits when it comes to performance. As partition counts and throughput climb, latency creeps in, resource usage spikes, and keeping things fast turns into a never-ending tuning war where every server matters.

Confluent Private Cloud features Intelligent Replication, bringing major performance and latency improvements from our cloud service to your private environment by optimizing how data is replicated between brokers. Intelligent Replication introduces a new, push-based mode that works alongside Kafka’s traditional pull-based approach. The system monitors replica status and switches between push and pull to get the best performance and consistency. When a follower is in sync, the leader proactively pushes data, cutting CPU overhead and keeping latency low.

The result? Up to 10x higher throughput and more predictable low latency—even as your partition counts grow. This allows you to support more demanding workloads and faster applications on the same hardware footprint, reducing your infrastructure spend and delaying the need for costly expansions.

Securely Unify Management and Monitoring Across Cloud and On-Prem Environments

When your Kafka footprint stretches across private infrastructure, managed cloud, and maybe even multiple clouds, keeping everything in check gets complicated fast. Governance is inconsistent, monitoring tools don’t talk to each other, and getting a clear view of what’s happening across all your clusters is a constant struggle. For large enterprises and service providers with sprawling Kafka deployments, the real challenge isn’t uptime; it’s control. Without unified management and monitoring, even simple questions about usage, security, or performance can turn into fire drills.

USM, available as an add-on for Confluent Private Cloud, brings everything together under a single, secure control plane. It uses a lightweight agent in your on-prem environment to securely send metadata (while your actual data stays in your private environments) to Confluent Cloud. This gives you one place to manage schemas, track lineage, and monitor health across your entire Kafka estate.

No matter how many clusters or environments you’re running, with USM, you can enforce data quality and compliance policies consistently, reduce operational overhead, and simplify troubleshooting and audits—all without exposing sensitive data or disrupting your existing workflows. That’s the difference between just keeping the lights on and actually delivering a platform you can trust and scale.

A Better Experience for Platform Builders

Confluent Private Cloud is designed to fundamentally change the economics and effort of running a data streaming platform on-prem. You get the efficiency and automation you’d expect from the cloud without giving up control. Platform teams can deliver reliable, high-performance data streaming to every corner of their businesses while confidently supporting demanding workloads, enforcing security and governance policies centrally, and adapting quickly as needs evolve. With Confluent Private Cloud, enterprises can focus less on firefighting and more on building a data platform that drives innovation and growth across the organization.

What’s Next for Confluent Private Cloud

Looking ahead, the vision for Confluent Private Cloud is to make running Kafka at scale on your own infrastructure as simple and reliable as it is in the cloud. The goal is to take the heavy lifting out of day-to-day operations so that platform teams can focus on delivering value to their businesses, not building custom tooling or wrestling with manual processes.

The roadmap is focused on deeper automation, smarter scaling, and stronger security. Think true Day 2 operational simplicity, all powered by the cloud-native design principals we’ve perfected in Confluent Cloud.

Here’s what’s on the horizon:

• Bin Packing for Maximum Efficiency: Intelligent workload scheduling will automatically place workloads across your Kubernetes infrastructure to maximize resource utilization and efficiency. By packing workloads more effectively, you’ll reduce hardware sprawl, cut down on wasted capacity, and get more out of your existing infrastructure, ultimately lowering your total cost of ownership.

• Fleet Manager for Day 2 Simplicity: This serves as a dedicated control plane that will give your team blueprint templates for deploying and managing your entire data streaming platform on Kubernetes. This will abstract away the complexity of configuration, orchestration, and life cycle management, making it easier to operate at scale.

• Built-in Multi-Tenancy and Resource Isolation: Features such as Client Quotas and Logical Namespaces will let you safely host hundreds of teams on shared infrastructure without worrying about noisy neighbor issues. Each workload gets the performance and isolation it needs.

The future is about giving your developers a stable, well-governed platform where they can move fast and build with confidence, knowing the heavy lifting of operations, scaling, and security is being handled behind the scenes.

Getting Started: Deploying Confluent Private Cloud

The architecture for Confluent Private Cloud is based on running on Kubernetes infrastructure. To get started, you’ll need a Confluent Private Cloud subscription. This unlocks access to the software and support you’ll need to operate at scale. For a new deployment, here’s the quickstart path to getting your new DSP-as-a-Service up and running:

• Begin by setting up your Kubernetes infrastructure. You’ll need an existing Kubernetes environment as the foundation for your deployment.

• Deploy the Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) Operator using the provided Helm chart on your Kubernetes cluster. The operator streamlines the management and orchestration of Confluent components.

• With the operator in place, you can use CFK’s custom resources to deploy your Confluent Private Cloud, Kafka Connect, and Apache Flink® clusters. This approach ensures consistent, automated provisioning and management of your streaming platform components.

• Set up the Confluent Private Cloud Gateway in front of your Kafka clusters to centralize client access and policy enforcement and make it easier to manage security and migrations.

• Finally, point your client applications to the Confluent Private Cloud Gateway endpoint. This step allows clients to connect without any changes to their code while you maintain full control over routing and access.

Confluent Private Cloud is a premium solution built for central platform teams, managed service providers, and cloud service providers who want to offer a robust data streaming service on their own managed infrastructures. For detailed deployment instructions and best practices, refer to the product documentation and reach out to the Confluent team for support.

We can’t wait to see what you build with the cloud-native building blocks of Confluent Private Cloud!

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based on services, features, and functions that are currently available.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Apache Flink®, Flink®, and the Kafka and Flink logos are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.