In a recent blog post, Confluent announced the general availability of Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure. Confluent Cloud is a fully managed Apache Kafka service that removes the burden of operationally managing Kafka for engineers.
The availability of Confluent Cloud on the Azure Marketplace follows the earlier release this year on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. Dan Rosanova, senior group product manager at Confluentinc, told InfoQ:
Marketplace integration with Azure simplifies the customer experience by allowing a customer to use their Azure account to pay for Confluent Cloud services. We enabled this experience for GCP customers recently as well. You can find Confluent Cloud in the Marketplace and directly sign up and start using our service and be billed by the cloud provider marketplace itself. I think this a fascinating development in the cloud ecosystem and is indicative of the future direction of the industry.
As on the GCP Marketplace, separate bills are no longer the case – customers can now use Confluent Cloud with their existing Azure credits. Moreover, any consumption of Confluent Cloud is part of the monthly Azure bill.
Next to the benefit of one bill, customers can leverage what Confluent Cloud has to offer such as tools to build event streaming applications, Confluent Schema Registry, and connectors such as Azure Blob Storage Sink, and KSQL.
Users can find Confluent Cloud in Azure Portal via the Marketplace and select it. Next, they can purchase the service by providing a name, associating the subscription it should belong to, and select the billing term (monthly or yearly). By purchasing the service, users will commit to paying for consumption through so-called Confluent Consumption Units (CCU) – one CCU equals $ 0.01.
Source: https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-cloud-managed-kafka-service-azure-marketplace/
When users click to purchase, the Azure Platform will deploy the service, which can take a few seconds. Next, once the service is available, users can start configuring the service by registering a service admin and create clusters.
Microsoft currently has a similar offering on its platform with Event Hubs and accompanying Kafka endpoint. Furthermore, when combining Stream Analytics customers can have identical capabilities as Confluent Cloud - high-throughput messaging, storage, and stream processing. Ricardo Ferreira, a developer advocate at Confluentinc, states in the announcement blog post:
Confluent Cloud has a much simpler and richer development model. But Confluent Cloud does not have to be a replacement for existing Azure technologies such as Event Hubs and Stream Analytics. You can continue to use them with any existing application and use Confluent Cloud for new applications.
More details on Confluent Cloud are available on the website.
