KSQL, the streaming SQL engine for Apache Kafka, is now available as a fully-managed service on the Confluent Cloud Platform for all its customers on usage-based billing plans.
In a recent blog post, Confluent made an announcement for the availability of Confluent Cloud KSQL. KSQL was one of the available capabilities on the first preview of the release of the Confluent Cloud Platform. It is now production-ready and available for Confluent Cloud customers as part of the streaming platform.
Derek Nelson, Senior Product Manager at Confluent, stated in the announcement blog post that Confluent Cloud KSQL eliminates the innate complexities of operating infrastructure in production. Nelson added that we take care of running production-grade infrastructure at scale while you focus on solving business problems with KSQL and added transformations, stream-to-stream joins, aggregations and data enrichment can all be accomplished using KSQL, with just a few lines of SQL.
Bart Kersteter, a system engineer at Confluentinc, said in a tweet that KSQL is great for writing streaming data apps, especially for non-java programmers. It is now fully supported and available in Confluent Cloud.
Apache Kafka could be the ideal choice to power data pipelines and KSQL has the potential of simplifying the transforming of data within the pipeline and land into other systems. KSQL queries are powered by the KSQL Server engine that also performs the reads, processing, and writes of data to- and from the Kafka cluster. Users through the KSQL UI in the Confluent Control Center can interactively interact with KSQL Engine through the REST API.
Source: https://docs.confluent.io/current/ksql/docs/index.html
Confluent Cloud provides a production-ready environment in minutes on cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Service (AWS). Since 2017, the company has made the Apache Kafka streaming platform available on AWS and on the GCP- and Azure marketplace in recent months. Confluent Cloud enhanced its Cloud Platform with KSQL as Dan Rosanova, Senior Group Product Manager at Confluentinc, said ksqlDB is really a new kind of database that has been purpose-built for stream processing applications.
Rosanova added we see ksqlDB as an integral service rounding out our cloud offering as a complete streaming platform, beyond Kafka, enabling end to end stream processing workloads. The Senior Group Product Manager at Confluentinc further added that it compliments our Connect service as well which enables streaming connectivity to and from many services and platforms. Rosanova also said that these services all compose together to provide users an event streaming SaaS that they can use to build and run sophisticated and complete modern applications.
More details on Confluent Cloud KSQL are available on the documentation page and the availability of Confluent Cloud on the various public cloud platforms and features are listed on the supported features page.
