Confluent

Founded by the creators of Kafka, Confluent provides "Kafka for the Enterprise." It offers Confluent Cloud (serverless) and Confluent Platform (self-managed). It adds a massive ecosystem of tools missing from vanilla Kafka, including a Schema Registry, pre-built Connectors, and enterprise-grade security.

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Why use it in EDA? Open-source Kafka is powerful but operationally heavy. Confluent removes the burden of management (Zookeeper, upgrades) and adds the "Schema Registry," which is non-negotiable for preventing data contracts from breaking between teams.

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How do we use it?

• Connectors: Instantly hooking up legacy databases to modern cloud warehouses.
• Stream Governance: Enforcing strict data contracts (schemas).
• ‍ksqlDB: Writing SQL queries against streaming data for real-time insights.