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Queues for Apache Kafka® Is Here: Your Guide to Getting Started in Confluent

Queues for Apache Kafka® Is Here: Your Guide to Getting Started in Confluent

Confluent announces the General Availability of Queues for Kafka on Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform with Apache Kafka 4.2. This production-ready feature brings native queue semantics to Kafka through KIP-932, enabling organizations to consolidate streaming and queuing infrastructure while...


AI Tools for Builders — Confluent's MCP Server & Agent Skills

AI Tools for Builders — Confluent's MCP Server & Agent Skills

Confluent's AI developer tools are now GA: an open-source local MCP server, a managed MCP server, and Agent Skills. Together they give AI coding assistants direct access to your streaming platform — the tools to act on it and the domain knowledge to build correctly.


New in Confluent Intelligence: Real-Time Context Engine Upgrade, New Model Support, ML Functions, and More

New in Confluent Intelligence: Real-Time Context Engine Upgrade, New Model Support, ML Functions, and More

Explore new Confluent Intelligence features: enhanced querying with Real-Time Context Engine, PII detection, sentiment analysis, and support for TimesFM, Anthropic, and Fireworks AI models.


Why ELT Can't Keep Up in the Era of High-Scale Data Engineering

Why ELT Can't Keep Up in the Era of High-Scale Data Engineering

Batch ELT pipelines create duplication, cost spikes, and governance gaps as data scales. Here’s why enterprises are rethinking legacy integration models.


How to Protect PII in Apache Kafka® With Schema Registry and Data Contracts

How to Protect PII in Apache Kafka® With Schema Registry and Data Contracts

Protect sensitive data with Data Contracts using Confluent Schema Registry.


Confluent Deepens India Commitment With Major Expansion on Jio Cloud

Confluent Deepens India Commitment With Major Expansion on Jio Cloud

Confluent Cloud is expanding on Jio Cloud in India. New features include Public and Private Link networking, the new Jio India Central region for multi-region resilience, and streamlined procurement via Azure Marketplace. These features empower Indian businesses with high-performance data streaming.


From Pawns to Pipelines: Stream Processing Fundamentals Through Chess

From Pawns to Pipelines: Stream Processing Fundamentals Through Chess

We will use Chess to explain some of the core ideas behind Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink. We’ve used the chessboard as an analogy to explain the Stream/Table duality before, but will expand on a few other concepts. Both systems involve sequences, state, timing, and pattern recognition and...


Stop Treating Your LLM Like a Database

Stop Treating Your LLM Like a Database

GenAI thrives on real-time contextual data: In a modern system, LLMs should be designed to engage, synthesize, and contribute, rather than to simply serve as queryable data stores.


Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part III) – Scaling AI in Real Time: Data Streaming and Event-Driven Architecture

Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part III) – Scaling AI in Real Time: Data Streaming and Event-Driven Architecture

In this final part of the blog series, we bring it all together by exploring data streaming platforms (DSPs), event-driven architecture (EDA), and real-time data processing to scale AI-powered solutions across your organization.


Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part II) – Enhancing Generative AI: Adding Context with RAG and VectorDBs

Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part II) – Enhancing Generative AI: Adding Context with RAG and VectorDBs

In Part 2 of the series, we take things a step further by enhancing GenAI with the tools it needs to deliver smarter, more relevant responses. We introduce retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases (VectorDBs), key technologies that provide LLMs with the context they need.


Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part I) – Data as the Engine: Building the AI Fundamentals

Generative AI Meets Data Streaming (Part I) – Data as the Engine: Building the AI Fundamentals

This blog series explores how technologies like generative AI, RAG, VectorDBs, and DSPs can work together to provide the freshest and most actionable data. Part 1 lays the foundation for understanding how data fuels AI, and why having the right data at the right time is essential for success.


Unify Streaming and Analytical Data with Apache Iceberg®, Confluent Tableflow, and Amazon SageMaker® Lakehouse

Unify Streaming and Analytical Data with Apache Iceberg®, Confluent Tableflow, and Amazon SageMaker® Lakehouse

Tableflow can seamlessly make your Kafka operational data available to your AWS analytics ecosystem with minimal effort, leveraging the capabilities of Confluent Tableflow and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse.


Shift Left: Headless Data Architecture, Part 2

Shift Left: Headless Data Architecture, Part 2

Building a headless data architecture requires us to identify the work we’re already doing deep inside our data analytics plane, and shift it to the left. Learn the specifics in this blog.


Shift Left: Headless Data Architecture, Part 1

Shift Left: Headless Data Architecture, Part 1

A headless data architecture means no longer having to coordinate multiple copies of data, and being free to use whatever processing or query engine is most suitable for the job. This blog details how it works.


Shift Left: Bad Data in Event Streams, Part 2

Shift Left: Bad Data in Event Streams, Part 2

Event design plays a big role in your ability to fix bad data in your streams. But if you’ve wrecked a stream with bad data (i.e., it’s unavoidably contaminated), you'll need to employ a "rewind, rebuild, and retry" strategy.


Shift Left: Bad Data in Event Streams, Part 1

Shift Left: Bad Data in Event Streams, Part 1

At a high level, bad data is data that doesn’t conform to what is expected, and it can cause serious issues and outages for all downstream data users. This blog looks at how bad data may come to be, and how we can deal with it when it comes to event streams.


Introducing Versioned State Store in Kafka Streams

Introducing Versioned State Store in Kafka Streams

Versioned key-value state stores, introduced to Kafka Streams in 3.5, enhance stateful processing capabilities by allowing users to store multiple record versions per key, rather than only the single latest version per key as is the case for existing key-value stores today...


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