Confluent Cloud Integration with Azure is now generally available
Published date: January 26, 2021
Customers are shifting away from 24-hour batch processing and moving towards real time event streaming to meet demands for highly personalized, responsive, real-time applications and drive business innovation. The Azure cloud platform offers a rich set of capabilities and services in this regard and we are continuously looking for ways to offer more choice, ease of use and delightful experiences on Azure. If you have requirements to use managed Apache Kafka services provided by our partners such as Confluent Cloud you will need to create and manage users and resources separately in Azure and Confluent Cloud service. This process can be complex and time-consuming. To reduce the burden of managing across platforms, Microsoft, in collaboration with Confluent, built an all new integrated provisioning layer between Azure and Confluent Cloud.
Confluent still runs and supports their SaaS application hosted on Azure which comes with environments, clusters, topics, API Keys and managed connectors. Together, we have built a best-in-class provisioning, onboarding, and management experience for our customers.
The unified integration with Confluent Cloud enables the following capabilities for you:
- Provision a new Confluent Cloud organization resource from Azure client interfaces like Azure Portal/CLI with fully managed infrastructure.
- Streamline single sign-on(SSO) from Azure to Confluent Cloud with your existing Azure Active Directory(AAD) identities.
- Get unified billing of your Confluent Cloud service usage through Azure subscription invoicing with an option to draw down on Azure commits; Confluent Cloud consumption charges will simply appear as a line item on monthly Azure bills.
- Manage Confluent organizations from the Azure portal, and track them in the All resources page, alongside your Azure resources.
Try out this new service, “Apache Kafka on Confluent Cloud” via the Azure Marketplace.