Streaming in the Clouds: Where to Start

In the cloud-first era, companies are adopting hybrid or multi-cloud strategies due to vendor lock-in concerns and the need for flexibility in leveraging best-in-class services from different cloud providers. However, this complexity creates new challenges such as architecting data movement between multiple applications and clouds, making it appear as a single cohesive system across the company. Apache Kafka has emerged as a key enabler of hybrid, cloud-only, and multi-cloud strategies due to its ability to build real-time pipelines and apps. Confluent Replicator can be used to replicate data across datacenters and public clouds, providing a simple and scalable solution to bridge data into the cloud. By building a hub-and-spoke implementation based on a central Kafka platform, companies can migrate their data step-by-step while maintaining data consistency across both on-prem and cloud environments. Confluent Cloud provides Apache Kafka as a fully managed service in various cloud providers, allowing companies to offload management burden and focus on migration strategy and plan.