Accelerate the shift to real-time with the industry’s first visual interface for building, testing, and deploying data pipelines natively on Apache Kafka^®

Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, today announced Stream Designer, a visual interface that enables developers to build and deploy streaming data pipelines in minutes. This point-and-click visual builder is a major advancement toward democratizing data streams so they are accessible to developers beyond specialized Apache Kafka experts. With more teams able to rapidly build and iterate on streaming pipelines, organizations can quickly connect more data throughout their business for agile development and better, faster, in-the-moment decision making.

"We are in the middle of a major technological shift, where data streaming is making real time the new normal, enabling new business models, better customer experiences, and more efficient operations,” said Jay Kreps, Cofounder and CEO, Confluent. “With Stream Designer we want to democratize this movement towards data streaming and make real time the default for all data flow in an organization.”

In the streaming era, data streaming is the default mode of data operations for successful modern businesses. The streaming technologies that were once at the edges have become core to critical business functions. This shift is fueled by the growing demand to deliver data instantaneously and scalably across a full range of customer experiences and business operations. Traditional batch processing can no longer keep pace with the growing number of use cases that depend on sub-millisecond updates across an ever-expansive set of data sources.

Organizations are seeking ways to accelerate their data streaming initiatives as more of their business is operating in real time. Kafka is the de facto standard for data streaming, as it enables over 80% of Fortune 100 companies to reliably handle large volumes and varieties of data in real time. However, building streaming data pipelines on open-source Kafka requires large teams of highly specialized engineering talent and time-consuming development spread across multiple tools. This puts pervasive data streaming out of reach for many organizations and leaves existing legacy pipelines clogged with stale and outdated data.

“A rising number of organizations are realizing streaming data is imperative to achieving innovation and maintaining a healthy business,” said Amy Machado, Research Manager, Streaming Data Pipeline, IDC. “Businesses need to add more streaming use cases, but the lack of developer talent and increasing technical debt stand in the way. Visual interfaces, like Stream Designer, are key advancements to overcoming these challenges and make it easier to develop data pipelines for existing teams and the next generation of developers.”

Stream Designer: The First Visual Interface for Rapidly Building Streaming Data Pipelines Natively on Kafka

“Data streaming is quickly becoming the central nervous system of our infrastructure as it powers real-time customer experiences across our 12 countries of operations,” said Enes Hoxha, Enterprise Architect, Raiffeisen Bank International. “Stream Designer’s low-code, visual interface will enable more developers, across our entire organization, to leverage data in motion. With a unified, end-to-end view of our streaming data pipelines, it will improve our developer productivity by making real-time applications, pipeline development, and troubleshooting much easier.”

Stream Designer provides developers a flexible point-and-click canvas to build pipelines in minutes and describe data flows and business logic easily within the Confluent Cloud UI. It takes a developer-centric approach, where users with different skills and needs can seamlessly switch between the UI, a code editor, and command-line interface to declaratively build data flow logic at top speed. It brings developer-oriented practices to pipelines, making it easier for developers new to Kafka to scale data streaming projects faster.

With Stream Designer, organizations can:

• Boost developer productivity: Instead of spending days or months managing individual components on open source Kafka, developers can build pipelines with the complete Kafka ecosystem accessible in one visual interface. They can build, iterate and test before deploying into production in a modular fashion, keeping with popular agile development methodologies. There’s no longer a need to work across multiple discrete components, like Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, that each require their own boilerplate code.

• Unlock a unified end-to-end view: After building a pipeline, the next challenge is maintaining and updating it over its lifecycle as business requirements change and tech stacks evolve. Stream Designer provides a unified, end-to-end view to easily observe, edit, and manage pipelines and keep them up to date.

• Accelerate development of real-time applications: Pipelines built on Stream Designer can be exported as SQL source code for sharing with other teams, deploying to another environment, or fitting into existing CI/CD workflows. Stream Designer allows multiple users to edit and work on the same pipeline live, enabling seamless collaboration and knowledge transfer.

Connect with Confluent at Current to learn more!

See Stream Designer in action at Current. Today, October 4 at 10:00 am CT, Confluent CEO and Cofounder Jay Kreps takes the stage to talk about the data streaming category in the keynote “Welcome to the Streaming Era.” And, on October 5 at 10:00 am CT tune into the mainstage for a deep dive into the product. Register now to see it virtually. Live demos will be given for in-person attendees at the Confluent booth.

Additional Resources

• Read the blog for more details on Stream Designer: https://www.confluent.io/blog/building-streaming-data-pipelines-visually/
• See how Confluent is helping its customers transform their businesses: https://www.confluent.io/customers/
• Join Confluent and apply for one of its open positions: https://www.confluent.io/careers/

About Confluent

Confluent is the data streaming platform that is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure that sets data in motion. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion—designed to be the intelligent connective tissue enabling real-time data, from multiple sources, to constantly stream across the organization. With Confluent, organizations can meet the new business imperative of delivering rich, digital front-end customer experiences and transitioning to sophisticated, real-time, software-driven backend operations. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io.

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services, features, and functions that are currently available.

Confluent and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Confluent, Inc.

Apache^® and Apache Kafka^® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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