Confluent, the company of the founders of Apache Kafka, recently announced a new strategic alliance between them and Microsoft to enable a more integrated experience between Confluent Cloud and the Azure platform.
With Confluent Cloud as part of the Azure platform, customers can leverage Kafka as a managed service and stream data into Azure data services for low-latency, real-time analytics with pre-built connectors to Azure Data Lake Gen 2, Databricks, Cosmos DB, and Azure Synapse for analytics. Furthermore, they can create a fabric for event streams that span on-premises and cloud environments to enable modern cloud workloads to connect up to legacy systems – and leverage machine learning capabilities to get real-time insights from incoming data and share those insights with applications.
Source: https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-microsoft-announce-strategic-alliance/
Confluent launched its fully-managed Apache Kafka service called Confluent Cloud a year ago on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) marketplace first, followed by the Azure marketplace in March. Moreover, later the company also made Confluent Cloud available on the AWS marketplace.
With the new alliance, the company strengthens its collaboration with Microsoft around the Confluent Cloud offering on Azure. Dan Rosanova, head of product management at Confluent Cloud, told InfoQ:
We had a marketplace integration before, but this partnership goes further; we now have integrated authentication based on AAD, so you get SSO out of the box. We supported SSO early, but it was a manual setup process, so you have two different identity chains, at least until you configured SSO. You also get to see your Confluent Cloud resources within the Azure portal and click right into our cloud experience right from Azure’s carrying that identity over without a separate login.
Customers can provision Confluent Cloud resources using Azure client interfaces like Azure portal, command-line interface (CLI), and software development kits (SDK)s. Furthermore, next to the SSO integration using Azure Active Directory, the service billing is unified through Azure.
Also, Rosanova said:
We do have other work coming, really continuing this integration and better serving our joint customers. We also partner with other cloud providers, but their cloud platforms aren’t the same. Our integrations and partnerships with them progress depend on many technical and business factors. Ideally, we want to make using Confluent Cloud as transparent and straightforward to customers of any cloud.
Confluent Cloud is available in the Azure marketplace, and customers can try it for free. Furthermore, details creating solutions through the Azure Marketplace are available in the Pay-As-You-Go Confluent Documentation and Commitments - Confluent Documentation.
