Confluent and Microsoft are pleased to announce the successful integration of Confluent Platform into Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. Users can now rapidly deploy a complete Confluent Platform cluster with the click of a button. The deployment will include the core Apache Kafka services along with the additional source-available and commercial services that comprise Confluent Platform. Customers who wish to use the commercial components beyond the initial 30-day trial period can purchase a software subscription directly from Confluent.

Confluent Platform on the Azure cloud platform enables reliable data integration within and between Azure environments with the following key benefits:

Continuous Availability

Apache Kafka’s distributed architecture has no single point of failure. In combination with the advanced reliability of the Azure platform, the Confluent Platform deployment is virtually immune from unplanned downtime or infrastructure-related service disruptions.

Linear Scalability of Server and Client Layers

Confluent Platform supports the full range of Azure’s virtual machine instance types, allowing users to customize their deployments for predicted workloads. Additional Confluent instances can be deployed to expand the capacity of both the broker layer and the client tier, without incurring application downtime or other disruptions.

Extensive (and growing) Library of Connectors

The Kafka Connect framework allows simple and robust integration between data systems, including Azure’s core data services (e.g. SQL Database) and other offerings (e.g. Cassandra, Couchbase, etc.). By configuring and deploying supported Connectors in the Confluent Platform deployment, Azure users can build flexible pipelines to extract the most business value from their data with a minimum of effort. See an up-to-date list of available Connectors.

To get started, simply log on to your Azure account and search for the Confluent Platform solution template. The template blades will allow you to configure and deploy your Confluent environment in a manner of minutes. More details on the configuration options can be found in this white paper.