Confluent has announced the preview release of its fully managed Elasticsearch Service Sink Connector in Confluent Cloud, an event streaming service based on Apache Kafka. This connector simplifies operations by eliminating the need for users to manage their own Kafka Connect clusters and supports major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. Elasticsearch Service, part of Elastic Cloud's SaaS offerings, allows easy deployment and scaling of Elastic products, and it must be located in the same region as the Kafka cluster to avoid data movement charges. The blog details a use case involving a food delivery scenario where new user information is propagated to an Elasticsearch Service index via a Kafka topic, demonstrating the integration process with a Python script and configuration in Confluent Cloud. Users can visualize data with a Kibana dashboard, and the blog also highlights the release of Confluent Platform 7.7, featuring enhanced security and support for Apache Flink and new connectors.