Real-time streaming is a business imperative for digital transformation
Customers are undergoing rapid transformations to stay competitive in an increasingly digital world with cloud design patterns and event streaming playing critical roles in their success. They depend on real-time event streaming and data processing to simplify, automate, and combine real-time results with the historical data stored in data repositories for driving business innovation. Major trends like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous mobile devices, and IoT have caused an explosion of data leading customers to modernize their data platforms and embrace fully managed offerings that relieve them from operational complexities.
The Azure cloud platform offers a rich set of capabilities and services in this regard, but we are always looking for ways to offer you more choice, ease of use, and delightful experiences. We are announcing the collaboration with Confluent, a popular provider of managed Apache Kafka service for event streaming. This service will enable you to provision Confluent Cloud resources using Azure client interfaces like Azure portal, command line interface (CLI), and software development kits (SDK)s. The other integration points include single sign-on using Azure Active Directory and unified billing through Azure. You have the option to draw down on existing Azure commitments towards Confluent Cloud service usage.