The benefits of using managed services in application development include rapid iteration and agility, allowing developers to focus on their unique expertise and respond quickly to user feedback. The importance of reliability is highlighted by the need for guaranteed low-latency and high-availability service delivery in event-based applications like Apache Kafka. Confluent Cloud offers a reliable and performant managed streaming service with constant upgrades and deployment guarantees, ensuring that users get the latest features and bug fixes. Proactive Support for Confluent Platform provides real-time analysis of cluster metadata to identify potential problems before they happen, enabling proactive issue resolution and faster problem mitigation. The key to world-class operational management lies in rich environmental context and deep Kafka experience, which is provided by Confluent's team of experts and its global operation of large-scale use cases. By leveraging these tools, organizations can ensure the reliability and performance of their event streams.