Confluent is introducing features that enable Kafka clusters to scale more easily, allowing businesses to meet real-time customer expectations without the need for detailed capacity planning. This scalability is expected to be beneficial for both self-managed and cloud-native environments. The new features include Operator, which automates the process of adding brokers, Tiered Storage, which decouples compute from storage resources, and Self-Balancing Clusters, which optimizes resource utilization. Together, these features simplify the scaling process, making it faster and more efficient, and enabling businesses to take advantage of cloud-native data systems that can scale up as demand peaks and down as demand falls.