Many teams initially turn to their cloud provider's managed Kafka services for simplicity, only to discover they still bear significant operational burdens, such as managing partitions, scaling, and resolving failures. Confluent Cloud offers a fully managed alternative, designed to alleviate these challenges through advanced features like elastic scaling, diskless storage, and proactive incident resolution, which significantly lower the costs associated with Kafka operations. Powered by the Kora engine, Confluent Cloud redefines Kafka for the cloud by decoupling storage and compute, automating maintenance tasks, and ensuring resilience with self-healing capabilities. This architecture not only improves performance and reliability but also delivers substantial cost savings, as evidenced by SecurityScorecard's reported $1 million savings after migrating to Confluent Cloud. By offering a truly cloud-native experience with high-level abstractions and integrated networking options, Confluent Cloud simplifies Kafka operations, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.