What does Confluent do?

Tool: Confluent

Their Pitch

The world's data streaming platform.

It's a highway for your data - moves information between your apps and databases in real-time instead of dumping it in batches overnight.

Deep Dive & Reality Check

+**Your fraud detection runs on yesterday's data and you're missing live threats** → Spot suspicious activity the second it happens, not 24 hours later
+**You're manually syncing customer data between 8 different tools** → Everything updates automatically when someone changes their email or upgrades their plan
+**Your recommendation engine shows stale products because data updates overnight** → Product views, purchases, and inventory changes flow instantly to your recommendation system
+Freight clusters cut logging costs by 90% - hidden feature that saves thousands on high-volume data like AI training logs
+Handles multicloud data sync without building custom bridges between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

>Your data pipelines break every weekend and you're tired of weekend alerts
>You need real-time updates across 10+ tools but everything's stuck in batch mode
>Your team spends more time fixing Kafka than building features

-Teams under 50 people - you're paying enterprise prices for complexity you don't need
-Companies wanting plug-and-play simplicity - this requires someone who understands data streams or you'll hate it
-Pure analytics teams doing weekly reports - just use Snowflake and save your sanity

*Apache Flink (to actually process and transform the streaming data once Confluent moves it)
*Snowflake (where the processed streams eventually land for analytics and reporting)
*AWS/Azure/GCP (Confluent runs on top of these clouds and connects to their databases)
*dbt (to clean up and model the data after it flows through Confluent)
*Salesforce/HubSpot (common sources feeding customer data into the streams)
*Slack (where you get alerts when streams break or data volumes spike unexpectedly)
*Terraform (to manage all the infrastructure because clicking through Confluent's UI gets old fast)

!You'll spend 2-3 weeks learning Kafka basics even with their "easy" cloud version
!Usage costs spike fast if you don't monitor - people report 2-3x their expected bills from unplanned data volume
!Schema changes break everything if you don't set up governance early - one bad update kills your entire pipeline

Apache Kafka for people who don't want to babysit Kafka clusters at 3am.