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Can someone ELI5 what confluent is/does? Going to the landing page of any enterprise B2B Saas company is always bizarre. You can tell nobody cares if the copy

Can someone ELI5 what confluent is/does? Going to the landing page of any enterprise B2B Saas company is always bizarre. You can tell nobody cares if the copy makes sense because these types of products get sold in person.

omg-a-bear 5y ago
They're a Kafka SaaS company, offering cloud hosted Kafka instances as well as support. They also contribute to Kafka and manages various language specific drivers.
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  Yup, it's founded by a bunch of the original developers of Kafka to provide additional services around it.
the-dude 5y ago
bizarre -> kafkaesque
dtech 5y ago
They're one of the main contributors of Kafka. They offer closed-source software directly related to Kafka, Kafka SaaS and support/training.
tiew9Vii 5y ago
They offer commercial support services/contracts for Apache Kafka. They sell proprietary Apache Kafka add-ons for enterprise such as authentication/authorisation RBAC. The open source Kafka release supports auth/authz but not consistently between the suite of tools. They also have a monitoring UI etc. They release the commercial add-ons under the Confluent platform distribution. They heavily push ksqldb which is a sql layer on top of Kafka that competes with https://lenses.io/ https://lenses.io/. Confluent market it as a DB but that’s pushing the creative marketing. They provide a hosted Kafka service. The hosted service is likely more attractive to SMEs. It also has competition with the SME market with AWS providing managed Kafka. Confluents service does have extras on top of AWS like tiered storage behind a non open source license but nothing is stopping any one building there own tiered storage. I can see people using Confluent’s cloud but don’t see it being big. Large corporations will (have) generally hosted/run their own Kafka. I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable. Cloudera is an example, they couldn’t make the service business work, I feel Confluent will have the same issues. Elastic search have issues with AWS eating some of the market. Confluent have the exact same issues. The Kafka is your nerve center narrative, that is great from Confluents perspective financially but it’s no different than the old enterprise service bus as the nerve center for everything. There’s a reason we don’t see that anymore.
- victor106 5y ago
  > hey heavily push ksqldb which is a sql layer on top of Kafka Can Kafka replace a database? We have an architect within our company that heavily pushes using Kafka for everything (as a database, a caching layer, message bus etc.,)
  - mac01021 5y ago
    Kafka can replace a database in some cases, depending on your query patterns and ability to partition the data intelligently. It excels at write-heavy workloads and, if you're already using Kafka for streaming or message passing then you can use it as a key-value store in order to avoid the extra operational burden of dealing with a distinct service for caching or storage. But if you need a data warehouse or just a relational query engine for data at rest, or if your data volume is not too large and you're not already using kafka, you're probably better off with a regular DB.
    - victor106 5y ago
      Thank you.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  > I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable. I've seen what some corporate customers pay for an enterprise license. It's kind of insane.
  - tiew9Vii 5y ago
    Yes it is yet they have massive losses. The money is also likely in the same ballpark of Cloudera / Horntonworks and other companies providing professional services for open source software who have all struggled to make the business model work.
  - runako 5y ago
    SaaS S-1s often have a section about this. From Confluent's: "As of March 31, 2021, we had 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, across a wide range of industries, compared to 374 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 50%. As of March 31, 2021, we had 60 customers with $1.0 million or greater in ARR, compared to 33 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 82%."
deleted 5y ago
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omg-a-bear 5y ago

They're a Kafka SaaS company, offering cloud hosted Kafka instances as well as support. They also contribute to Kafka and manages various language specific drivers.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago
Yup, it's founded by a bunch of the original developers of Kafka to provide additional services around it.

the-dude 5y ago

bizarre -> kafkaesque

dtech 5y ago

They're one of the main contributors of Kafka. They offer closed-source software directly related to Kafka, Kafka SaaS and support/training.

tiew9Vii 5y ago

They offer commercial support services/contracts for Apache Kafka. They sell proprietary Apache Kafka add-ons for enterprise such as authentication/authorisation RBAC. The open source Kafka release supports auth/authz but not consistently between the suite of tools. They also have a monitoring UI etc. They release the commercial add-ons under the Confluent platform distribution. They heavily push ksqldb which is a sql layer on top of Kafka that competes with https://lenses.io/ https://lenses.io/. Confluent market it as a DB but that’s pushing the creative marketing. They provide a hosted Kafka service. The hosted service is likely more attractive to SMEs. It also has competition with the SME market with AWS providing managed Kafka. Confluents service does have extras on top of AWS like tiered storage behind a non open source license but nothing is stopping any one building there own tiered storage. I can see people using Confluent’s cloud but don’t see it being big. Large corporations will (have) generally hosted/run their own Kafka. I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable. Cloudera is an example, they couldn’t make the service business work, I feel Confluent will have the same issues. Elastic search have issues with AWS eating some of the market. Confluent have the exact same issues. The Kafka is your nerve center narrative, that is great from Confluents perspective financially but it’s no different than the old enterprise service bus as the nerve center for everything. There’s a reason we don’t see that anymore.

victor106 5y ago
> hey heavily push ksqldb which is a sql layer on top of Kafka Can Kafka replace a database? We have an architect within our company that heavily pushes using Kafka for everything (as a database, a caching layer, message bus etc.,)
- mac01021 5y ago
  Kafka can replace a database in some cases, depending on your query patterns and ability to partition the data intelligently. It excels at write-heavy workloads and, if you're already using Kafka for streaming or message passing then you can use it as a key-value store in order to avoid the extra operational burden of dealing with a distinct service for caching or storage. But if you need a data warehouse or just a relational query engine for data at rest, or if your data volume is not too large and you're not already using kafka, you're probably better off with a regular DB.
  - victor106 5y ago
    Thank you.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
> I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable. I've seen what some corporate customers pay for an enterprise license. It's kind of insane.
- tiew9Vii 5y ago
  Yes it is yet they have massive losses. The money is also likely in the same ballpark of Cloudera / Horntonworks and other companies providing professional services for open source software who have all struggled to make the business model work.
- runako 5y ago
  SaaS S-1s often have a section about this. From Confluent's: "As of March 31, 2021, we had 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, across a wide range of industries, compared to 374 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 50%. As of March 31, 2021, we had 60 customers with $1.0 million or greater in ARR, compared to 33 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 82%."

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]