Confluent is a fully managed Kafka service that Storyblocks chose over other hosted Kafka services due to its data governance capabilities, including Stream Quality, Stream Catalog, and Stream Lineage, which allow for better management of schema repositories and automated checks on downstream processes. Confluent also provides connectors to over 100 popular sources and sinks, reducing engineering time and technical debt. The company's Infinite Storage feature separates compute and storage in an event streaming platform, making storing increased amounts of data simpler and more cost-effective. Additionally, Confluent offers cloud-native features such as automated Kafka patching with zero downtime, capacity planning, and elastic scaling without the overhead of dealing with ZooKeeper, partitions, and JVMs. This expertise has been invaluable to Storyblocks, providing peace of mind and support for mission-critical use cases. With Confluent, Storyblocks can focus on innovating and pushing event-based streaming use cases forward.