TMT Series #2: Confluent, a new paradigm for handling data (Part 1/2)

Exhaustive two part analysis on Confluent and the data-in-motion space

What do Linkedin, Netflix, BMW, Uber and Euronext have in common in terms of data infrastructure technology? They all use open source software Kafka (or its enterprise version Confluent) to provide a unified, high speed, low-latency platform for handling huge amounts of data in real-time and power critical business applications.

In this article, I will go over what Kafka is, its use cases (I look at the automotive, retail and financial services industries) and how it powers mission critical business cases as well as dig into Confluent to assess how it is differentiated from open-source Kafka, its competitive advantages and ultimately assess whether it’s a sound investment following the company’s IPO in June 2021.

Sections:

• Tech infrastructure architectures today

• What is Kafka? What is event streaming processing?

• Example of use cases

• Which companies use Kafka today

The Genesis of Kafka: from data at rest to data-in-motion

a. Modern infrastructure architectures

Before, infrastructure technology has mostly focused on building one application and the data store that services it but if we think about how a company is built today, the underlying architecture is much more complex than this; there are usually several applications, data stores and warehouses. The data is spread over all of the infrastructure and has to be interconnected to create the “Company”.