Data Streaming Turns Data at Rest into Data in Motion

From event-driven architectures to real-time analytics and AI, everything you build starts here.

Data streaming moves high-throughput, low-latency data between systems in real-time. Confluent’s CEO, Jay Kreps, co-created Apache Kafka®—the open source standard for data streaming.

Today, thousands of startups and enterprises trust Confluent instead of managing Kafka. Our cloud-native Kafka engine, KORA autoscales GBps+ workloads 10x faster with 10x lower tail latencies––and a 99.99% SLA.

What Can You Do With Data Streaming On Confluent?

Access Events as They Happen

With data streaming, you don’t operate brittle point-to-point pipelines. Instead, every event—like a click, transaction, sensor reading, or database update—is written to a shared append-only log.

Confluent streams data for any use case:

  • Cluster options: Optimize your resources at the lowest cost, with pay-as-you-go pricing
  • Cluster linking: Automatically syncs data across global architectures within your private network
  • Enterprise security: Includes RBAC, encryption in transit and at rest, and BYOK
  • 1800+ certifications: Include SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS Level 1, HIPAA, and FedRAMP Moderate

Decouple Data Producers and Consumers

Any number of data producers can write events to a shared log, and any number of consumers can read those events independently and in parallel. You can add, evolve, recover, and scale producers or consumers—without dependencies.

Confluent integrates your legacy and modern systems:

  • Client libraries: Deploy a sample client app in minutes using your preferred language
  • Pre-built connectors: Avoid 3-6 engineering months of designing, building, and testing each connector
  • Fully managed connectors: Launch in minutes without operational overhead, reducing your total cost of ownership
  • Custom connectors: Build your own integrations and let us manage the Connect infrastructure

Use High Quality Data Everywhere

Once events are in the stream, they’re organized into logical topics like "orders" or "payments”. Applications, analytics, and AI all access these topics as a shared source of record.

Confluent enriches your data as it’s created—not after it’s batched:

  • Stream processing: Filters, transforms, and joins each event in real-time using SQL
  • Data contracts: Enforce schema and semantic validation before bad data enters the system
  • Stream catalog: Organizes topics for self-service enrichment and access through a UI or APIs
  • Tableflow: Represents topics in open table formats such as Apache Iceberg® and Delta Lake

What Can You Build With Data Streaming on Confluent?

Event-Driven Applications—From Microservices to AI Agents

Create highly scalable and resilient self-service data platforms, generative AI applications, and even multi-agent AI systems that act and react to events in real-time.

Shift Left Analytics

Eliminate wasteful data proliferation, manual break-fix, and high costs by processing and governing data at the source, within milliseconds of its creation.

Real-time Foundation for AI

Unleash cutting-edge GenAI and agentic AI with Confluent. Bring real-time, contextualized and trustworthy data to your LLMs, vector databases, agents, and RAG applications.

Deployment Options

Confluent can be deployed across multi-cloud, hybrid, edge, and on-premises environments at [a cost less than open-source Kafka and your favorite hyperscaler](/content/pricing/cost-estimator/ "Cost estimator"/index.html).

Fully-managed Confluent Cloud

Cloud-native service that goes above and beyond Apache Kafka—available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud across 60+ regions.

Self-managed Confluent Platform

A complete, enterprise-grade distribution of Apache Kafka for workloads in your on-prem and private cloud environments.

Bring Your Own Cloud with WarpStream

A Kafka-compatible, Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) native data streaming service that is zero-access and secure by default.

Cloud-like, Self-managed Confluent Private Cloud

A complete, enterprise-grade, private data streaming service with cloud-native operations for large platform teams with demanding security and compliance needs.

Data Streaming With Confluent | FAQs

How does data streaming work on Confluent?

Both Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform are powered by enterprise distributed Kafka rearchitected for cloud-native scalability that is faster, most cost-effective, and more resilient. Confluent Cloud specifically is powered by Kora, a cloud-native Kafka engine that allows us to pass on significant savings to our customers—including up to 20-90%+ throughput savings with our autoscaling Standard, Enterprise, and Freight clusters.

Who are Confluent’s cloud-native data streaming capabilities for?

Using Confluent for data streaming is a solid choice for any organization that wants to modernize its data architecture, build event-driven applications, leverage real-time data for analytics and AI, and solve data integrity challenges that come with traditional, batch-based ETL.

Can I use Confluent’s data streaming platform with my existing Kafka topics?

Yes, Confluent is 100% compatible with Apache Kafka®. Tools like Cluster Linking enable you to create reliable, real-time replicas of your existing Kafka data and metadata in Confluent and can also be used to migrate your Kafka workloads without downtime.