Confluent, Inc. announced exciting new Confluent Cloud capabilities making it easier for customers to stream, connect, govern, and process data for more seamless experiences and timely insights while keeping their data safe. Confluent Tableflow easily transforms Apache Kafka topics and the associated schemas to Apache Iceberg tables with a single click to better supply data lakes and data warehouses. Confluent?s fully managed connectors have been enhanced with new secure networking paths and up to 50% lower throughput costs to enable more complete, safe, and cost-effective integrations.

Stream Governance is now enabled by default across all regions with an improved SLA available for Schema Registry, making it easier to safely adjust and share data streams wherever they?re being used. For companies to make decisions that optimize costs, boost revenue, and drive innovation, it requires connecting the operational and analytical estates of data, which are traditionally siloed in organizations. The operational estate includes the SaaS applications, custom apps, and databases that power businesses such as Oracle, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

The analytical estate includes data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics engines that power analytics and decision-making and use data streams and historical tables to run queries and different analytical functions. Many organizations turn to Kafka as the standard for data streaming in the operational estate, and to Iceberg as the standard open table format for data sets in the analytical estate. Using Iceberg, companies can share data across teams and platforms while keeping tables updated as the data itself evolves.

Companies using Kafka want to utilize Iceberg to meet the rising demand for both streaming and batch-based analytics. As a result, many companies must execute complex migrations which can be resource-intensive, resulting in stale and untrustworthy data and increased costs. Tableflow makes it easier to feed data warehouses and data lakes for analytics: Tableflow, a new feature on Confluent Cloud, turns topics and schemas into Iceberg tables in one click to feed any data warehouse, data lake, or analytics engine for real-time or batch processing use cases.

Tableflow works together with the existing capabilities of Confluent?s data streaming platform, including Stream Governance features and stream processing with Apache Flink, to unify the operational and analytical landscape. Using Tableflow, customers can: Make Kafka topics available as Iceberg tables in a single click, along with any associated schemas, Ensure fresh, up-to-date Iceberg tables are continuously updated with the latest streaming data from your enterprise and source systems and Deliver high-quality data products by harnessing the power of the data streaming platform with Stream Governance and serverless Flink to clean, process, or enrich data in-stream so that only high-quality data products land in your data lake. Tableflow is currently available as part of an early access program and will soon be available for all Confluent Cloud customers.

Connect brings new security, usability, and pricing enhancements to a portfolio of 80+ fully managed connectors: To build a central nervous system for a business, users have to be able to connect all of their data systems to capture continuous data streams. Connectors address the challenges of traditional data architectures that can silo data, decrease data quality, and lead to unplanned downtime. Connectors do this by seamlessly connecting data systems and applications as sources and sinks to Confluent Cloud. Confluent continues to add enhancements to connectors, a critical component of the data streaming platform, so that more users can experience fast, frictionless, and secure integrations.

With new upgrades to Connect, Confluent customers can: Connect securely to critical data systems in private networks using DNS Forwarding and Egress Access Points, Provision connectors reliably in seconds with real-time configuration validations and a 99.99% uptime SLA and Stream data affordably at any scale with up to 50% reduced data transfer costs of $0.025/GB.