No More Refreshing: Achieving Low Latency Data with Ably and Confluent Cloud

The post explains how to stream Kafka data from Confluent Cloud to end-user applications in real time through Ably’s Kafka Connector, combining Confluent Cloud’s managed Kafka processing, governance, and fault tolerance with Ably’s global edge delivery. It outlines prerequisites including Ably and Confluent Cloud accounts, API keys, Terraform, Node.js, and familiarity with Kafka, React, and Terraform, then directs users to clone a sample project and configure an environment file with an Ably API key. Terraform is used to provision a Confluent Cloud environment, basic Kafka cluster, schema registry, service account, an `orders` topic, and a Datagen source connector that produces mock order events. Users then manually upload the Ably Kafka Connector as a Confluent Cloud custom sink connector, configure it to consume the `orders` topic and publish messages to corresponding Ably channels, allow outbound traffic to Ably’s endpoint, and launch it. Running the included Next.js application displays the generated Kafka messages in a browser over an Ably real-time connection, while final cleanup instructions cover deleting the connector and destroying the Terraform-managed cloud resources to avoid ongoing charges.

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