AWS begins Managed Streaming service for Apache Kafka

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a fully managed service for Apache Kafka that lets developers build and run highly available, secure, and scalable applications based on Apache Kafka without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

Apache Kafka is used to capture and analyze real-time data streams from a range of sources, including IoT devices, website clickstreams, financial systems, and database logs. While many customers chose to self-manage their Apache Kafka clusters, they often spend a lot of time and expense securing, scaling, patching, and ensuring high availability for Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper clusters, which Apache Kafka depends on for resource management.

Amazon MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka, enabling customers to migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) clusters to Amazon MSK with no code changes. There are no commitments or upfront investment required to run Amazon MSK, and customers only pay for the capacity they use.

"Customers who are running Apache Kafka have told us they want to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time building applications based on real-time streaming data,” said Rajesh Sheth, General Manager of Amazon MSK, AWS. “Amazon MSK gives these customers the ability to run Apache Kafka without having to worry about managing the underlying hardware, and it gives them an easy way to integrate their Apache Kafka applications with other AWS services. With Amazon MSK, customers can stand up Apache Kafka clusters in minutes instead of weeks, so they can spend more time focusing on the applications that impact their businesses.”

https://aws.amazon.com/msk

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Confluent Secures $24 Million for Apache Kafka Solutions

Confluent, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, raised $24 million in Series B funding for its live data streaming solutions based on Apache Kafka technology. The founders of Confluent created Apache Kafka while at LinkedIn to help cope with the very large-scale data ingestion and processing requirements of the business networking service.

Apache Kafka, an open source technology created and maintained by the founders of Confluent, acts as a real-time, fault tolerant, highly scalable messaging system. It is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation. Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements—from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive. This infrastructure lets you build around a single central nervous system transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an company.


Confluent will use the Series B funding to continue investing aggressively in product development, adding new stream data management features to Kafka and the other elements of the Confluent Platform. The company is also building new stream processing capabilities that will enable analytical operations on real-time data streams, much like those available on standard databases today, for more static, slow-moving data.

"Because Kafka was born in the modern big data environment, it is designed to simplify the management of massive real-time data streams," says Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures. "Confluent’s platform can also support hundreds of applications built by disparate teams and is scalable, reliable enough to handle critical updates, and features a stream-processing framework that integrates easily and makes data available for real-time processing. Co-founders Jay, Neha and Jun Rao have created a highly intelligent product and we are excited to support their continued growth."

“Kafka has been a labor of love and it’s been thrilling to see the technology mature and advance. We began working together on Kafka and stream processing in 2010, and now Kafka processes 867 billion messages a day at LinkedIn,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent. “Today thousands of organizations are using Kafka and we expect in the years to come this will become a core platform within virtually every major company. Companies from all sectors are looking to evolve their data architecture to enable real-time stream data processing, and with the funding, we’ll be able to accelerate the development of the Confluent Platform to help companies best leverage the power of Apache Kafka.”

http://www.confluent.io/confluent-closes-24m-series-b-funding

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