Today, we are proud to make Confluent Cloud available to companies leveraging the Microsoft Azure ecosystem of services, in addition to the previous rollouts on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). For public cloud developers, Confluent Cloud is the only platform for managed Apache Kafka® as a service that offers true freedom of choice.

With Confluent Cloud on Azure, developers can focus on building applications, not managing infrastructure. They can enjoy cloud-native capabilities to quickly harness the power of Kafka to build event-driven applications and deliver the level of digital experiences that their customers expect. This is a huge advantage for organizations looking to improve customer experience, scale their businesses, and sharpen their competitive edge.

When Greg Gentling’s enterprise architecture team at Viewpoint Construction Software began reviewing messaging services earlier this year, they quickly realized they would need to patch together multiple technologies to build a next-generation messaging architecture. As Gentling and his team started searching for a better solution, they discovered Confluent Cloud event streaming platform as the potential answer.

The team was looking for a complete event streaming and data modernization platform to launch a fully managed Kafka-as-a-service solution. After learning more about Confluent Cloud capabilities, the team became one of the first users of Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure.

Now, Viewpoint leverages the fully managed service as the foundation of its next-generation architecture, which is designed to build real-time applications and aggregate data from legacy applications. Confluent Cloud on Azure helps the company stay competitive in the ever-growing construction software market.

“Initially, we were intrigued by the event streaming model of Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud,” Gentling said. “As we explored other technologies in the market, we saw a lot of vanilla hosted Kafka services that just didn’t seem as powerful as Confluent Cloud’s fully managed event streaming platform.”

Confluent Cloud includes components not found in other Kafka services, such as fully managed Kafka, fully managed Schema Registry for data compatibility, and fully managed ksqlDB for stream processing. In addition, Azure developers can take advantage of prebuilt Confluent connectors to seamlessly integrate Confluent Cloud with Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Functions, and more. Users can start streaming in minutes, thanks to the cloud-native capabilities of Confluent Cloud, quickly harnessing the power of Kafka to build event-driven applications that deliver the digital experiences their customers expect.

Confluent Cloud is the only Kafka service developed by the original creators of Kafka, and it’s fully managed for the greatest simplicity and ease of deployment. As an event streaming platform, Confluent Cloud is scalable, resilient, and secure to support enterprise-scale, mission-critical apps. Expert Kafka support is never far away, with a 60-minute response guarantee for P1 issues.

Confluent Cloud enables you to scale elastically from zero to hundreds of megabytes per second without sizing and provisioning clusters. With consumption-based pricing, you only pay for what you actually stream. There are no minimums or commitments. Confluent Cloud also offers completely configurable, dedicated setup for gigabytes-per-second scale, infinite retention, and private networking options. Even at gigabytes-per-second scale, applications built on Confluent Cloud on Azure can realize sub-25 ms latency.

“Our goal is to bring the very best solutions to our clients regardless of what ERP system they are running,” Gentling said. “Now, we can better serve our legacy ERP customers by plugging a SQL connector into the backend and using ksqlDB to transform and combine data in Confluent Cloud on Microsoft Azure. It’s now a 10-minute exercise rather than days or months of stitching together technologies.”

Ready to get started yourself? Try Confluent Cloud on Azure for free with up to $50 USD off your bill each calendar month for a limited time.