# 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](/content/confluent-cloud/kora/index.html) 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](/content/confluent-cloud/pricing/index.html) 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.