Relationship between Apache Kafka and Confluent

Question

I am learning Kafka recently.

What is the relationship between Kafka and Confluent?

Answer 1

Apache Kafka is an open-source Stream Processing Platform with a message broker/pub-sub system in its core and Java Producer/Consumer client libraries to read/write data from an application, Kafka Connect framework to import/export data from Kafka, and Kafka Streams library to process data stored in Kafka.

Confluent Inc. is a company and the main contributor to Apache Kafka: Top 10 contributors are all working at Confluent; including 10 Committers (including myself) (pages accessed May 2018):

• https://github.com/apache/kafka/graphs/contributors
• https://kafka.apache.org/committers

Additionally, Confluent adds additional tools on top of Apache Kafka. Those tools are offered as Confluent Open Source and Confluent Enterprise which both ship with Apache Kafka.

Confluent Open Source adds a KSQL, Rest Proxy, Schema Registry, Connectors for Kafka Connect, as well as Producer/Consumer client libraries in other languages (e.g., C/C++, Python).

Confluent Enterprise adds "Confluent Control Center" (a cluster and application monitoring tool), a multi-datacenter replication tool, and an auto-data-balancing feature. Additionally, you get 24/7 support.

Confluent also offers Confluent Cloud, a hosted and fully managed solution for Apache Kafka.