Confluent makes the open source event streaming platform Apache Kafka cloud-native. Confluent Cloud, which until recently was the company’s PaaS offering for Kafka, now offers a new consumption-based pricing model. There are no requirements for minimum use.
The news was announced at the Kafka Summit in London, according to ZDNet. Previously, Apache Kafka had to be paid by the hour, regardless of whether the service was actually used or not and how much the service was used.
The new service allows customers to scale up and down the use of their serverless infrastructure, between 0 and 100 MB/s. Prices are based on the volume of imports and withdrawals of data, as well as the volume of data that remain stored.
Confluent Cloud Enterprise also offers throughput speeds in excess of 100MB/s. However, this is only possible with the conventional infrastructure model and the two models cannot be combined for a single Kafka topic.
AWS and Google Cloud
The company itself states that Confluent Cloud is the first cloud-native Kafka service. By contrast, all major cloud providers have their own streaming data services. One of them, Microsoft’s Azure Event Houses service, even supports Kafka API. AWS also has its own Managed Streaming for Kafka, but that’s a PaaS solution.
The new Confluent Cloud consumption-based service is available on AWS and the Google Cloud Platform. It also includes fully managed versions of Confluent Schedule Registry, the KSQL query language, as an alternative API. This would otherwise require an additional, proprietary infrastructure. In the case of AWS, the service also includes the Kafka Connect S3 connector, which allows streamed data to be delivered to cloud object storage.
The fully managed Schedule Registry, KSQL and Kafka Connect S3 services are launched in public preview. The ball is now in the court of Microsoft, AWS and Google to give their own Kafka services similar pricing models, or to work more closely with Confluent.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.