We’re very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backbone for a wide array of technical and business data, like click stream events, ad impressions, social network change events, systems monitoring, messaging, analytics and logging applications.
Kafka has been described as ‘TiVo for data’ – you can put pretty much any streaming data into Kafka, store it in a distributed and resilient way and then play it out again from any point. It’s highly scalable and integrates well with other Big Data tools such as Apache Hadoop. We’ve used Kafka and its sister project Apache Samza to develop prototype high-performance media monitoring systems and we’re also using it along with Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (the ELK stack) to develop log monitoring and analysis systems. We’re hearing about many other potential uses of Kafka in the Big Data and Internet of Things ecosystems.
Our partnership with Confluent will allow us to work more closely together to provide a foundation for delivering better solutions faster for our customers based on Kafka and Confluent Platform, a complete and fully supported streaming data system based on Kafka and Hadoop.
“Kafka is creating a new paradigm for organizations and allowing businesses across industries to make informed, timely decisions from their data in real time” said Jabari Norton, VP Business Development at Confluent. “We are excited to include Flax among the ranks of a growing landscape of diverse partners and systems integrators committed to unlocking the potential of streaming data for their customers.”
We’ll be talking at the London Kafka meetup on April 13th if you’d like to find out more or discuss a potential Kafka project – if you can’t make it do get in touch.
