Introducing Confluent Cloud Freight Clusters

Confluent Cloud has introduced Freight clusters, a new type of cluster designed for high-throughput, relaxed latency workloads that can save up to 90% on costs compared to self-managing Apache Kafka. These clusters utilize Confluent's Kora engine, which uses direct write mode to write data directly to object storage services like S3, bypassing local storage and avoiding replication between brokers. This approach eliminates inter-AZ replication traffic and reduces network costs, while introducing some latency trade-offs. Freight clusters are designed for high-volume use cases such as logging, telemetry, or feeding data lakes, and utilize Elastic CKUs to auto-scale capacity up or down with the workload, allowing customers to pay only for the resources they use when needed.

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