In a recent blog post, Confluent announced the general availability of Confluent Cloud on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. Confluent Cloud is a fully managed Apache Kafka service that removes the burden of operationally managing Kafka from engineers.
In April last year, Google announced a strategic partnership with several leading open-source centric companies, including MongoDB, DataStax, and Confluent. Since then, the products of these companies, such as Confluent Cloud, are available as managed services on GCP. By signing up and providing a credit card as a payment method, users could get started with Confluent Cloud on GCP – yet billing was separate from the consumption of other GCP services. However, with the availability of Confluent Cloud in the marketplace, users will now have one bill for GCP services consumption.
Ricardo Ferreira, a developer advocate at Confluentinc, stated in the blog post:
You can now use Confluent Cloud with your existing project’s billing and credits. Any consumption of Confluent Cloud is now a line in your monthly GCP bill.
Through the Google Cloud console users can access the marketplace and search for Confluent Cloud to purchase the service. By purchasing the service, users will commit to paying for consumption through so-called Confluent Consumption Units (CCU) – one CCU equals $ 0.0001. Once a user purchases Cloud Confluent, they can enable the API and start managing the Apache Kafka service through GCP – that is, inside the Confluent Cloud users can create clusters through providing a name and selecting a region in GCP to spin them up.
Source: https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-cloud-managed-kafka-service-gcp-marketplace/
Besides the offering of a managed Kafka service in the cloud by Confluent, there are other cloud providers in the market offering the same services. For instance, Amazon launched a service called Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka, Amazon MSK for short, in preview during AWS re:Invent 2018 – and made the service generally available in June 2019. Furthermore, Microsoft partnered with Bitnami to offer a Kafka on Azure through their Marketplace.
Lastly, Confluent Cloud is also available on AWS and Azure. Dan Rosanova, senior group product manager at Confluentinc, told InfoQ:
Our goal is to provide a complete streaming service built around Apache Kafka and provide it to customers on any cloud they choose. We offer the same experience, capabilities, tools, and performance regardless of which cloud you've selected to run Confluent Cloud in. It is fully managed software as a service.
More details on Confluent Cloud are available on the website.
