Confluent acquires WarpStream

Confluent has acquired WarpStream, an Apache Kafka®-compatible data streaming platform. WarpStream’s Bring Your Own Cloud (“BYOC”) data streaming architecture is designed for organisations running large scale workloads with relaxed latency requirements in their own cloud environment, perfect for logging, observability, and feeding data lakes. With the acquisition of WarpStream, Confluent now has a data streaming offering for every company no matter the need—whether that’s fully managed with Confluent Cloud, self-managed with Confluent Platform, or BYOC with WarpStream.

A third offering for data streaming deployment

Many organisations 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 organisation’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 organisation.

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.”

A novel approach to BYOC

WarpStream co-founders Richard Artoul and Ryan Worl realised that if they could separate compute and storage to reduce the operational burden at the database layer, the same could also be done for the data streaming layer. WarpStream’s BYOC approach is built directly on object storage, just like Confluent’s Kora engine, and brings managed data streaming benefits into the customer’s cloud.

Under Confluent’s product umbrella, WarpStream will continue its mission to deliver customers a seamless BYOC experience while pushing forward an ambitious roadmap. In time, features like processing and governance will be added to WarpStream BYOC to provide a complete data streaming platform solution for high-volume logging and observability workloads.

“We’re excited that the leader in the data streaming space has acquired WarpStream to offer next-gen BYOC to customers,” said Richard Artoul, co-founder and CEO, WarpStream. “Together with Confluent, we will continue to ensure that Kafka-compatible data streaming is accessible to every organisation.”