Confluent has acquired WarpStream, known for its Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) data streaming architecture, ideal for large-scale workloads with relaxed latency, such as logging and data lakes. This acquisition expands Confluent’s data streaming solutions to include fully managed Confluent Cloud, self-managed Confluent Platform, and BYOC with WarpStream, catering to all organizational needs.
A third offering for data streaming deployment
Many organizations find that unlocking the full value of data needed for today’s most important business use cases is much harder than it should be, due to the fractured and siloed nature of the data estate. According to Confluent’s latest data streaming report, 91% of IT leaders are banking on data streaming platforms to drive their organization’s data goals forward.
Confluent’s mission is to build a data streaming platform for everyone so they can set their data in motion, regardless of their configurations and workloads.
Currently, Confluent achieves that with Confluent Cloud, its fully managed service, and Confluent Platform, its self-managed offering. Both are complete data streaming platforms that stream, connect, process and govern data, but they sit at opposite ends of the spectrum of operational burden and flexibility. Confluent Cloud eliminates the operational burden with the trade-off of control. Confluent Platform provides greater flexibility at the cost of a higher operational burden. The choice between the two depends on the specific needs and capabilities of an organization.
BYOC has emerged as a third option that falls in between fully managed and self-managed data streaming. BYOC uses a shared responsibility framework where the customer and the vendor are jointly responsible for the operations and health of the system. This joint responsibility gives customers more deployment flexibility, albeit at the cost of some operational overhead. This model benefits instances when regulatory or contractual barriers prevent a customer from using a fully managed solution. WarpStream’s next-gen BYOC brings a cloud offering to Confluent’s product portfolio for these customers who have high scale workloads with relaxed latency requirements such as logging, observability, and feeding data lakes.
“Confluent wants to offer data streaming to all customers with all requirements and workloads,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent. “I’ve been deeply impressed with WarpStream—it’s BYOC done right. With this acquisition, we have a data streaming offering for everyone.”