Confluent

Back-end & Platform Engineering Technology Enabler

Confluent is an industry-leading cloud-native data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka. It offers a complete suite of enterprise-grade features, including connectors, stream processing, security and data governance. Thanks to its maturity and reliability, Confluent is the preferred choice of numerous Fortune 500 companies for building event-driven architectures and real-time applications.

Bitrock has been a Confluent Premier Partner since 2018. This long-standing partnership has allowed us to develop extensive experience in the development of customized and scalable solutions, supporting customers in various strategic sectors such as retail, utilities, insurance and finance. Our team members have various certifications, such as Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka and Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka.

OVERVIEW

The Confluent platform is built around Apache Kafka, the leading open-source solution for distributed streaming. Confluent extends Kafka’s capabilities, offering a complete platform for managing and processing event streams in a scalable and reliable way.

Confluent offers two main versions:

Confluent Platform: On-premise or public cloud solution, ideal for companies that need complete control over the infrastructure. Designed for implementation on the public cloud or on-premise, Confluent Platform allows you to collect, distribute and transform events, guaranteeing their versioning and validation.

Confluent Cloud: Fully-managed SaaS version for those who want to take advantage of the cloud without worrying about infrastructure management. In addition to the features of the Confluent Platform, it offers additional advantages such as:

- Support for AWS, Azure and GCP: Freedom to choose the most suitable cloud provider.
- Fully-managed connectors: Over 70 connectors to simplify integrations, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Resource elasticity: On-demand scaling without the need for complex planning.
- Scalable storage: Automatic use of object stores to optimize storage costs.
- High resilience: 99.99% SLA with multi-zone replication and automatic updates.

ADvantages

Increased productivity: Simplifies the development of streaming applications, accelerating time-to-market.
Operational efficiency: Reduces complexity and guarantees high performance even with large volumes of events.
Ease of integration: Compatible with complex IT environments, responding to business production needs.
Flexibility of deployment: Confluent supports on-premise, cloud (managed and unmanaged) or hybrid solutions.
Support and community: In addition to official technical support, Confluent benefits from a large community of experts.
Wide range of functions: Advanced tools for managing data, metadata and applications.

Why focus on data streaming

Real-time integration allows you to create data subsets and snapshots useful for different consumption modes, both in real time and in batch mode. On the other hand, starting from a batch flow limits the possibility of evolving towards a continuous flow in the future, requiring greater effort and additional costs. Although streaming may seem more complex initially, the long-term advantages outweigh the initial investments, especially in a constantly evolving technological landscape.

Competitive Advantages of Streaming-Based Architectures

Adopting streaming-based architectures accelerates integration times, providing a significant competitive advantage. This speed is crucial to increase user satisfaction and improve the effectiveness of decisions based on real-time data.

At Bitrock, we believe that streaming platforms should be fed not only by operational data sources, but also by outputs from analytical systems, such as Machine Learning models. This approach opens up new opportunities to use the information generated by analytical systems and propagate this information in real time to operational systems.

SOLUTION

Confluent is a complete solution for managing and scaling data flows in real time, with flexible options for deployment, monitoring and governance. Whether your company operates on-premise, in the cloud or in hybrid environments, Confluent guarantees high performance, security and ease of use.

Infrastructure Management

Confluent Operator for Kubernetes: For cloud-native environments.
Ansible Playbook: For managing traditional deployments without containers.

Application Development

Kafka Connect: Tool for the scalable and reliable integration of Kafka with other systems (for example, databases, applications, clouds). It allows you to import and export data to and from Kafka.
Kafka Streams: Client library for processing data streams in real time. It allows you to transform, aggregate and enrich data directly within applications.
ksqlDB: SQL-based stream processing engine. It allows you to run queries and transformations on data streams in real time without the need to write code.
Confluent REST Proxy: REST API for interacting with Kafka, useful for integrating Kafka with applications that don’t support the native Kafka protocol.

Advanced Monitoring

Confluent Control Center: Graphical interface for monitoring and managing the Kafka platform. It provides tools for performance analysis, topic management and debugging.
Confluent Health+: Advanced analysis of cluster metrics with intelligent alerts.
Confluent CLI: To perform administration tasks.
Tiered Storage: Reduces storage costs by automatically moving older data to object stores.
Self-Balancing Clusters: Automatically balances partitions to optimize throughput.
Cluster Linking: For managing Kafka clusters distributed across data centers or cloud providers.
Multi-region Clusters: Reduces traffic between data centers by allowing consumers to read events from non-leading brokers.

Data Governance

Schema Registry: A centralized service for managing and validating data schemas (e.g. Avro, JSON Schema). It guarantees schema compatibility between producers and consumers.
Stream Catalog: A data catalog that facilitates the search for data and topics.
Stream Lineage: To trace the correlations between data streams in real time.

Security

TLS encryption: Protection of data in transit.
TLS/SSL or SASL authentication: Secure authentication.
Role-Based Access Control: Access management for the Control Center.

Data Streaming

Apache Kafka is one of the most widely used platforms for streaming data management, as it provides real-time integration between systems. Confluent, founded by the creators of Kafka, extends Kafka’s functionality to offer enterprise-ready solutions, reducing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and simplifying data management and use.

USE CASES

Below are some use cases that benefit from Confluent’s scalability in handling millions of events per second, its reliability in ensuring no data loss, and its capability for real-time processing:

financial services

In financial services and payment processing, banks implement Confluent to process transactions and detect fraud in real time. Payment events are transmitted through the platform, allowing for immediate validation and processing. Historical transaction data can be archived and analyzed for pattern recognition and risk assessment.

In compliance and audit tracking, financial institutions use Confluent to maintain audit trails of all transactions, capturing and storing every event for regulatory compliance, with data easily retrievable for audit purposes.

customer experience

Customizing the customer experience sees e-commerce platforms using Confluent to track customer behavior and preferences in real time. User interactions, such as clicks, searches and purchases, are transmitted and processed immediately, allowing dynamic personalization of content and recommendations in real time.

transportation and logistics

In the transportation and logistics sector, shipping companies are implementing Confluent to track fleet movements and optimize routes. Real-time GPS data from vehicles is processed to provide accurate delivery estimates, while the system can automatically adjust routes based on traffic and weather conditions.

HEALTHCARE

In healthcare data management, healthcare facilities use Confluent to manage patient data and medical device information. Real-time streaming allows for immediate updates to electronic health records, ensuring HIPAA compliance and maintaining data accessibility.