This quarter’s release of Confluent Cloud brings new features that fundamentally change the dynamic between stream and batch processing. The introduction of snapshot queries in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink enables fast, batch-style queries across Kafka topics as well as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake tables via Tableflow. This allows users to query historical and real-time data using a unified stream and batch processing interface. Additionally, the feature supports dual materialization, allowing a single topic to populate both Delta Lake and Iceberg tables simultaneously. Confluent Cloud also introduces support for enterprise clusters on Google Cloud, cross-cloud cluster linking, WarpStream diagnostics, and schema linking. These features aim to simplify secure connectivity, improve data governance, and enhance operational efficiency in the cloud environment.