SERVERLESS STREAM PROCESSING
Build Real-Time Data Pipelines, Instantly
Combine data streaming and stream processing to build data pipelines that turn business events into fresh, enriched, and ready-to-consume data products.
One-click integration for seamless stream processing
Multicloud support across 50+ regions on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud
Use existing skills with support for SQL, Python and Java
Stop wrestling with the operational overhead of managing separate, complex open source systems and stitching together a brittle ecosystem of tools. Instead, build, deploy, and scale reliable, real-time data pipelines that eliminate data silos using familiar languages.
Confluent Cloud is the only fully managed, serverless platform that combines the industry standards for streaming data and stream processing and empowers you to automate infrastructure management and secure pipelines from development to production. See what you can build when you're focused on delivering value with powerful real-time analytics and AI capabilities, not on managing clusters.
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Build CDC Pipelines with Apache Flink on Confluent
Learn howSeamless Integration Between Kafka and Flink
Eliminate integration headaches with a one-click union of Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® on Confluent where data is treated as a first-class, reusable product.
Kafka topics automatically appear as queryable Flink tables with schemas managed by Schema Registry, making processed data instantly reusable.
1-click integration
Kafka topics and schemas are always in sync with Flink
Cloud-native streaming
The cloud-native, fully-managed standard for Apache Kafka®
Cloud-native Apache Flink®
The open-source standard for stream processing
Native support for schema management
Schema Registry provides a centralized repository for managing and validating schemas for topic message data
Simplify Stateful Stream Processing
Harness the power of Flink, the de facto industry standard for complex, stateful event stream processing.
Use industry-standard ANSI SQL, Python, or Java to perform complex event processing, real-time aggregations, and stateful transformations with out-of-the-box support for fault tolerance, exactly once semantics and default watermarking strategies.
Deliver Value Faster With a Fully Managed Platform
Focus on building data products, not managing infrastructure, with a serverless experience.
Elastic autoscaling, usage-based pricing, and compute limits balance performance and cost. Flexibility across a browser-based UI, CLI, or VS Code extension, coupled with integrated monitoring tools such as stream lineage accelerate development from exploration to production.
Focus on code
Let Confluent Code manage everything else with our cloud-native, serverless Flink offering
Flink SQL workspaces
The primary, browser-based option for leveraging SQL to interact with your data in Confluent Cloud
Confluent CLI
Manage statements and compute pools in the CLI
VS Code extension
Build in deep focus with the VS Code extension
Build For an AI-first World
Build real-time, responsive AI/ML systems and event-driven agents.
Prepare data for real-time inference through capabilities like embedding, forecasting, and inference, while seamlessly integrating with external models, LLMs, tools, and frameworks. Flatten the AI tech stack, shifting focus from integration to AI value delivery.
Event-Driven Multi-Agent Systems
Event-driven by design, Streaming Agents communicate without rigid dependencies, collaborate with other agents, and adapt to real-time inputs. Powered by Kora Engine, this unlocks reliable multi-agent patterns such as Orchestrator-Worker or Hierarchical to enable unlimited enterprise use cases.
Personalization at Scale
Overcome operational challenges with self-managed streaming to implement a highly scalable, event-driven architecture that enables flexible microservices integration, streaming analytics, and AI use cases. Wix delivers the real-time data and event-driven operations businesses need to turn digital experiences and operations into increased innovation, revenue, and customer acquisition using Confluent Cloud.
Power Real-Time Diagnostics
Siemens Healthineers overcame fragmented data pipelines with Confluent to build a unified data backbone. This allows them to monitor medical equipment in near real-time, improve manufacturing quality, and save on data processing costs. By getting critical diagnostic data to analysts faster, they are able to enhance overall patient care.
"Stream processing is critical for identifying and protecting against security risks in real time. With Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering, we can access, aggregate, and enrich data from IoT sensors, smart cameras, and Wi-Fi analytics, to swiftly take action on potential threats in real time, such as intrusion detection. This enables us to process sensor data as soon as the events occur, allowing for faster detection and response to security incidents without any added operational burden."
“Stream processing is critical for identifying and protecting against security risks in real time. With Confluent’s fully managed Flink offering, we can access, aggregate, and enrich data from IoT sensors, smart cameras, and Wi-Fi analytics, to swiftly take action on potential threats in real time, such as intrusion detection. This enables us to process sensor data as soon as the events occur, allowing for faster detection and response to security incidents without any added operational burden.”
"We use Apache Flink to process our data before it reaches Snowflake, to avoid additional unnecessary costs. When we're talking about a data warehouse, it’s billions of data points in one table, and processing this data after storage is extremely expensive. Now, in Flink, our data is flowing continuously. We process it in time windows as it moves through the system. You can have your main data in one stream going to your data warehouse, but at the same time aggregate this data and send it downstream to another storage platform—it's a lot more cost-effective and efficient.”
“With Flink, we now have the opportunity to shift left and do a lot of early data transformations and computation on our data before it reaches Snowflake. This will optimize our data processing costs to increase the amount of data we have available ”
New developers get $400 in credits during their first 30 days—no sales rep required.
Confluent provides everything you need to:
- Build with client libraries for languages like Java and Python, sample code, 150+ pre-built connectors, and a Visual Studio Code extension.
- Learn from on-demand courses, certifications, and a global community of experts.
- Operate with a CLI, IaC support for Terraform and Pulumi, and OpenTelemetry observability.
You can sign up with your cloud marketplace account below, or directly with us.
Confluent Cloud
A fully managed, cloud-native service for Apache Kafka®
Stream Processing With Confluent | FAQs
What is Apache Flink and why is it used for stream processing?
Apache Flink is the de facto open-source standard for stateful stream processing, designed to run computations over unbounded, continuous data streams. It's used for building real-time data pipelines and event-driven applications because it provides low-latency processing, high throughput, and exactly-once consistency guarantees, which are critical for trustworthy, mission-critical systems.
Do I need Apache Kafka to use Confluent's Flink service?
Yes. Confluent Cloud is designed as a unified data streaming platform where Apache Kafka and Apache Flink are seamlessly integrated. Data must be in a Confluent Cloud Kafka topic to be processed by Flink. This tight integration is a core benefit, as it removes the need for custom connectors and provides a single, governed source of truth for all real-time data. However, Confluent Platform enables use of Flink with a variety of sources outside Apache Kafka.
How is Confluent's serverless Flink different from open-source Apache Flink?
Confluent Cloud provides a fully managed, serverless Flink service that eliminates the significant operational complexity of deploying, scaling, and securing open-source Flink. While open-source Flink is a powerful engine, Confluent provides a complete data streaming platform around it, including zero-config integration with Kafka, an integrated Schema Registry, enterprise-grade security, and a usage-based pricing model, allowing teams to focus on logic, not infrastructure.
How can I control costs with Flink's usage-based pricing?
Confluent Cloud provides several tools for cost management. The pricing is pay-as-you-go, based on CFUs consumed per minute, so you only pay for what you use. You can set configurable, hard spending limits on your compute pools to prevent budget overruns and monitor usage through the Metrics API to optimize your queries for cost-efficiency.