Confluent & Kafka

Every time someone swipes a credit card, streams a song or checks a flight status, a message fires between servers. By 2018, over 70% of Fortune 100 companies ran Apache Kafka to move those messages in real time. The software was free. The company that built it charged nothing. J-Craps co-founded Confluent to sell what Kafka could not provide on its own. The open source project handled message streaming. Confluent sold the management layer, monitoring, security, compliance, multi-cloud deployment. A company running Kafka internally needed two to four engineers dedicated to maintenance. Confluent replaced those engineers for $60,000 a year. The economics were asymmetric. Kafka usage grew with data volume.