With the increasing importance of real-time data in modern businesses, companies are leveraging distributed streaming platforms to process and analyze data streams in real-time. Confluent Platform allows users to connect, process, and react to all their data in real-time with a comprehensive, self-managed platform for Apache Kafka. The platform has introduced several core features that make hybrid and on-premises data streaming simple, secure, and resilient. These features include Apache Kafka Raft metadata mode, which improves stability, simplifies the software, and makes it easier to monitor, administer, and support Kafka. Additionally, Confluent for Kubernetes provides a comprehensive, declarative API to deploy and operate Confluent as a cloud-native system on Kubernetes. The platform has also introduced compaction support for Tiered Storage, allowing users to offload even more data to object storage and improve elasticity. Furthermore, the ecosystem of connectors built by Confluent, the Kafka community, or partners enables customers to integrate different ecosystems with Kafka and Confluent Platform more quickly and reliably. The platform's features have been validated in production usage with multiple backing object storage vendors. To ensure high-quality data, the platform has introduced Data Quality Rules, which serve as a formal agreement between upstream and downstream components regarding the structure, semantics, and quality of data in motion. Overall, Confluent Platform 7.6 is built on Apache Kafka 3.6 and includes several new features that simplify architecture, enhance security, and enable cost-effective scaling.