During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Instacart faced unprecedented demand, which tested its systems and processes, highlighting the importance of elasticity in cloud-native computing for businesses to scale efficiently and cost-effectively. Confluent has significantly enhanced its cloud platform's elasticity, making it 10 times more elastic than Apache Kafka by leveraging Confluent Cloud Intelligent Storage. This improvement allows for faster data movement and scaling operations, reducing the time required for cluster expansions and contractions, and minimizing operational burdens such as capacity planning and data rebalancing. The platform's elasticity not only enhances scalability but also improves resiliency against failures, lowers total cost of ownership, and enables seamless upgrades with minimal downtime, making it a robust solution for modern data infrastructure needs. Additionally, Confluent has announced the general availability of Platform 7.7, featuring enhanced security and new integrations, encouraging users to explore its capabilities through a free trial.