Confluent Delivers Fastest Route to Achieving Real-Time, Event-Driven Applications for Google Cloud Customers

With Confluent’s new managed Apache Kafka connectors and native Google Cloud Marketplace integration, organizations can quickly build critical use cases powered by the industry’s leading event streaming platform and Google Cloud ecosystem

Mountain View, Calif. – April 6, 2020 – Confluent, Inc., the event streaming platform pioneer, announced today achievements from its strategic partnership with Google Cloud, including being named Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for Smart Analytics. This recognition comes as an influx of organizations leverage event streaming for mission-critical use cases running on Google Cloud, including microservices, machine learning, image processing and real-time data pipelines. Since the launch of their strategic partnership, Confluent aimed to deliver the quickest way for organizations to build, deploy and scale event-driven applications on Google Cloud. As a result, the number of Confluent customers deployed on Google Cloud has increased more than tenfold year over year.

“We’re proud to recognize Confluent as our Technology Partner of the Year for Smart Analytics,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud. “Confluent on Google Cloud enables customers to quickly and easily build event-driven applications, with powerful analytics capabilities, from the ground-up. Organizations are increasingly turning to Confluent on Google Cloud to build and run their core IT architectures, and we look forward to partnering with Confluent to help them do so.”

Consumers have incredibly high expectations for applications today. Gone are the days of monolith applications built on batch data dumps. Now, consumers expect applications to quickly accommodate their rapidly changing demands. This requires applications to be built with intelligence and automation to adapt to the context of the moment. To gain this level of flexibility and agility, many organizations are turning to public clouds and open source event streaming solutions like Apache Kafka®. However, streaming data at scale and in real time can be challenging, especially for organizations sitting on decades of data and complicated architectures.

“Across every industry, organizations are adopting cloud technologies to achieve the business agility and flexibility needed to succeed,” said Simon Hayes, Vice President, Corporate and Business Development at Confluent. “Businesses are looking for ways to harness the vast amounts of critical data in their legacy systems to fuel the next generation of applications built with those cloud tools. Through a strong, strategic partnership with Google Cloud, we’ve built a persistent bridge to cloud for data to span traditional applications and cloud-native environments. Now, organizations can rapidly build game-changing applications that are powered by Confluent’s real-time streaming data and the intelligence of Google Cloud’s powerful analytics and machine learning tools.”

As a company built and operated by the original creators of Kafka, Confluent is dedicated to enabling any organization to harness the full power of event streaming. For Google Cloud customers who lack the size, skills or budget required to run Kafka clusters, they have the option to leverage Confluent’s fully managed Kafka as a service. With Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud Platform, teams don’t have to deal with the burdens of managing and securing underlying Kafka infrastructure. This frees them up to focus on building real-time big data pipelines that can easily scale and be used for applications in machine learning, IoT and across multi-cloud use cases. Since Confluent and Google Cloud established a strategic partnership last year, they have focused on deepening their joint capabilities to provide a fast, frictionless way to build event-driven applications.

The Only Fully Managed Kafka Service Now Natively Available in the Google Cloud Console

To gain the scalability and performance critical workloads demand, many developers, operators and architects have made Kafka and cloud platforms essential to their technology stacks. However, as use cases grow and become more complex, the more time teams need to spend on managing Kafka clusters, cloud costs and other operational burdens.

To solve this issue for Google Cloud users, Confluent made Confluent Cloud, its fully managed Kafka service, available on the GCP Marketplace with a cloud-native experience. Now, Google Cloud users have the quickest route to event streaming right from the Google Cloud Console and GCP Marketplace. Google Cloud customers now benefit from a simplified, frictionless experience by leveraging their existing billing service on Google Cloud and using Google Cloud credits on Confluent Cloud. And with consumption-based billing for Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud, pricing is simply based on data that is in use.

New Managed Kafka Connectors Offload Operational Burden of Streaming Data In and Out of the Google Cloud Ecosystem

Developing ways to connect an event streaming platform to various sources and sinks is a time consuming task given the initial build, ongoing fixes and maintenance. To further enhance productivity for Kafka developers, Confluent works closely with its technology partners to launch supported connectors that easily get data in and out of Kafka.

In partnership with Google Cloud, Confluent built fully managed connectors for Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse BigQuery (preview). These are also available as self-managed connectors in Confluent Platform along with Google Cloud BigTable, Functions, Spanner, Dataproc, Firebase Realtime and over 100 total connectors. This significantly speeds up the process of delivering event-driven applications.

Supporting Customer Quotes

“As the largest bank in Indonesia, we rely on Confluent Cloud and Google Cloud to build and deploy real-time, event-driven systems that beat out the competition in terms of reliability, security and customer satisfaction. With Confluent and Google Cloud, we’re able to harness the agility of public cloud while maintaining our production levels on premises.” –Kaspar Situmorang, Executive Vice President at Bank Rakyat Indonesia

“Event streaming in the cloud has been central to our initiative to launch a data fabric platform at Intrado. Confluent and Google Cloud have enabled us to build a real-time, centralized, conference-mixing platform and hub that are critical to ensuring uninterrupted, high quality streaming conference services to our customers. Confluent and Google Cloud have made it possible to centralize data from all over the world and build a scalable, network latency sensitive and reliable platform.” – Thomas Squeo, CTO, Intrado

“My small team has the large responsibility of managing the data infrastructure underpinning Unity’s development platform that powers more than 50 percent of all new mobile games. We chose to build our data infrastructure on Confluent Platform, Apache Kafka, and Google Cloud Platform to reliably handle half a million events per second with zero outages and support our move to becoming an agile, data-driven company.” – Oguz Kayral, Engineering Manager, Data Platform, Unity

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View and London, with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download.

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

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