IBM and Confluent have announced a partnership whereby the Confluent platform will become part of the Cloud Pak for Integration. Big Blue offers the latter as an integration platform for applications and data. It offers a modular approach for and with containerized applications.

(Image: IBM)

Write with Kafka Confluent is the company behind Apache Kafka, a distributed platform for big data applications in the field of messaging and streaming. The system originally developed by LinkedIn, version 2.6 of which appeared in April, has been under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation since 2012. The platform owes its name to the Czech author Franz Kafka, as Jay Kreps, one of the core developers, says: “I thought that since Kafka is a system that is optimized for writing, the name of a writer would make sense.”

The Kafka developers founded 2014 Confluent out of LinkedIn and, together with the company, offer a platform based on Apache Kafka designed for enterprise applications. As with other open source projects, the commercial offer extends the open source basis with additional functions for monitoring, infrastructure and operation, among other things. In addition to the Confluent platform, the company has a managed cloud service in its portfolio.

Extended offer Apache Kafka has been part of the Cloud Pak for Integration for some time. Through the partnership, IBM is now expanding its offer to include the complete Confluent platform with the additional functions.

Big Blue is responsible for first and second level support; Confluent takes over on the third level for more complex problems. The post on the Confluent blog sees the partnership as a sign that event streaming has now arrived in the mainstream after a long period in which start-ups in particular relied on Apache Kafka as early adopters.

In the cloud blog, IBM lists the reason for the integration that many companies want to create personalized applications and use real-time data such as transactions and clicks want to use on websites or sensor data from an IoT device. Confluent offers the most comprehensive platform for this type of data processing.

(rme)