How Extend Leverages Confluent's Data Streaming Platform for Backend Communications

Extend, a product protection platform serving merchants in industries such as automotive, electronics, jewelry, and furniture, adopted Confluent Cloud and AWS to support real-time product catalog updates and transition from SNS/SQS-based asynchronous messaging to a more scalable event-driven architecture. Its earlier serverless-first AWS approach reduced infrastructure management during its MVP phase, but increasing transaction volumes and seasonal spikes exposed limitations in throughput, event ordering, and duplication handling. Confluent’s fully managed Kafka service provided ordered, replayable, retained events while removing the need for engineers to manage clusters, brokers, networks, and other Kafka infrastructure. Extend automated resource provisioning, permissions, access controls, and topic creation through CloudFormation, CDK, Confluent APIs, internal libraries, and AWS Lambda triggers, allowing engineers to build new data streams quickly without long-lived infrastructure. The implementation improved scalability, operational efficiency, security through least-privilege access, and time to market, while reducing total cost of ownership and supporting future data mesh initiatives and integrations with merchant platforms such as NetSuite, Shopify, and BigCommerce.

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