Confluent Gives Streaming Data More Enterprise Chops

Confluent today unveiled an update to its streaming data platform that will introduce new enterprise features, including more fine-grained permissions for data access, data observability, and a guarantee of four-nines of availability for its hosted Apache Kafka service.

Last year, Confluent introduced role-based access controls (RBAC) to Confluent Cloud, its hosted version of Apache Kafka. With today’s launch it’s now extending RBAC deeper into the data plane, giving its customers the ability to control access to sensitive data, including individual Kafka topics, consumer groups, and transactional IDs.

The update will allow Confluent to set and enforce clear rules for users depending on their rolls, and allow application owners to give administrators, operators, and developers access only to the data they require specifically for their jobs, Confluent says.

On the observability front, an expansion to the Cloud Metrics API will bring two new capabilities designed to give customers greater visibility into the state of their streaming data operation.

One of these observability capabilities will give customers a better view into how data is streaming across their business and where resources are being used. Confluent says this will help customers that are ramping up their data streaming operations and need to manage internal chargebacks by business unit.

The other capability will provide consumer lag monitoring, which is important for meeting customer expectations. This Clod Metrics API will help identify hotspots in data pipelines, Confluent says, which will help customers figure out where resources need to be scaled up to avoid a reduction in customer satisfaction.

Confluent has also bolstered its integration with Grafana Cloud to allow customers to consume the observability data from that monitoring tool. This helps to preserve customer choice, the vendor says.

The Mountain View, California company also announced the general availability of its Premium Connector for the Oracle Change Data Capture (CDC) product. This will allow customers to grab new data hitting the Oracle database event log and quickly make it available in the hosted Kafka service.

Finally, Confluent is also launching a new 99.99% uptime service level agreement (SLA) for Confluent Cloud. The deal covers infrastructure, Kafka performance, critical bug fixes, and security updates running in the standard and dedicated packages.

Confluent Cloud is available in basic, standard, and dedicated packages on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

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