Confluent Cloud has introduced a new private networking option called Private Network Interface (PNI) on Amazon Web Services (AWS), designed to enhance security and optimize costs for data streaming workloads. PNI leverages AWS networking primitives to provide secure and cost-efficient private connectivity with low latency and high throughput, crucial for modern Kafka workloads. It is now available on both Freight and Enterprise clusters, offering significant cost reductions in throughput, notably by reducing costs from $0.05 to $0.04 per GB for Enterprise clusters and to $0.03 for Freight clusters. This innovation addresses the often-overlooked area of networking costs, which have grown critical with the rise of data-intensive workloads like AI and event-driven applications, by eliminating the cost-security trade-off inherent in traditional networking options like VPC peering and AWS PrivateLink. PNI enables centralized security, freedom from IP address management, and reduced data transfer costs, fundamentally altering the cost curve for streaming workloads. For instance, Indeed has successfully partnered with Confluent to implement PNI, achieving up to 60% reductions in network transfer costs while also enhancing security and system resilience.