Confluent launches new cloud capabilities to enhance data streaming

Confluent has announced new Confluent Cloud capabilities that help organisations build a secure shared services platform for data streaming.

The shared services architectural model allows for efficient, cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure resources, which is especially important as businesses budgets tighten and new competitors constantly emerge, the company states.

With Confluent's newly added OAuth support, Cloud Client Quotas, and expanded Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC), businesses can unlock more real-time innovation and widespread access to data streaming without worrying about degrading application performance, increasing costs, or introducing new operational burdens, the company states.

Confluent bundling of their Client Quotas, OAuth support, and expanded Role-Based Access Controls capabilities provides enterprise-level security across services and individuals, delivering a path for organisations to expand data streaming adoption in a safe, secure, and cost-effective manner.

Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent, says, "This year, many businesses are in a tough spot where resources are tight, but expectations for real-time experiences and operations remain high.

"This release helps organisations connect and stream data from across their business in the most cost-effective and safest way possible. A secure, shared services platform for data streaming saves valuable time and resources while ensuring data and applications are safe and easily accessible across clouds."

With the current market environment, organisations are looking to minimise costs and reduce infrastructure spending. Yet, businesses often manage hundreds of applications spread across different business units and teams, making it extremely difficult to keep operating expenses under control, Confluent states.

Typically, each application requires dedicated resources and tuning to maintain expected performance levels. In addition, identity and access management across large numbers of individuals and applications is a substantial operational burden. Teams often need to manage identity credentials across several vendors and manually ensure that they are always in sync to provide a seamless user experience.

"Businesses are looking for ways to efficiently run all of their applications side-by-side to help overcome rising infrastructure costs and operational burdens, and a shared services model has become essential for large businesses to scale their data platforms in a cost-effective way," says Amy Machado, Research Manager, Data Streaming Pipeline at IDC.

Machado continues, "Confluent bundling of their Client Quotas, OAuth support, and expanded Role-Based Access Controls capabilities provides enterprise-level security across services and individuals, delivering a path for organisations to expand data streaming adoption in a safe, secure, and cost-effective manner."

A shared services model enables organisations to run multiple applications on one cluster, saving infrastructure costs and simplifying operations. With this release, Confluent Cloud makes implementing this model simpler with seamless identity management integrations, stronger access controls, and precise resource utilisation controls for an enterprise-wide, multi-tenant implementation, the company states. These new shared services capabilities help to run apps at the same time and cut infrastructure and authentication resource needs.

New capabilities include:

• Support for OAuth reduces the operational burden of scaling workloads with centralised identity management: With OAuth, a cloud-native authentication standard, organisations can integrate and protect their applications with third-party identity providers to efficiently scale workloads and reduce operational burdens.
• New Client Quotas protect individual application performance with cloud-native resource utilisation controls for a multi-tenant deployment: Using Cloud Client Quotas in Confluent Cloud, enterprises can now build and manage a multi-tenant, shared services data streaming platform in the cloud, delivering enterprise-wide access to Apache Kafka while reducing operational complexity and cost. 
• Enhanced RBAC is now available for all Confluent Cloud resources to ensure compliance, confidentiality, and privacy at scale: With expanded Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to Schema Registry, Connect, and ksqlDB, customers can set granular permissions for users with a click of a button. Enforced permissions across all cloud resources ensure complete data protection and privacy.