Confluent, Inc. announced a new strategic alliance with Microsoft that establishes Confluent Cloud as a fully managed Apache Kafka® service directly available on Microsoft Azure. Through this alliance, Confluent and Microsoft are furthering their product collaboration and have released a new single sign-on capability from Azure Active Directory to Confluent Cloud that significantly streamlines the experience of getting started with event streaming. Azure customers can now access an extensive library of pre-built connectors, a unified billing model with options to use Azure committed spend on Confluent Cloud, and deeper integrations with Azure services.

Now, organizations can leapfrog operational burdens of event streaming to build modern, real-time applications faster. As businesses shift away from 24-hour batch processing and move toward real-time event streaming, they face growing technical complexities around adopting, scaling, and maintaining Kafka. This often hinders them from having the infrastructure needed to support the modern, real-time applications their customers are demanding.

With Confluent Cloud's seamless integration on Azure, it's now easier than ever to start using Kafka to stream events across Azure services to power real-time applications throughout a business. For Azure customers, we're making the process of adopting event streaming easier than ever by alleviating the typical infrastructure management needs that often pull developers away from building critical applications. With Confluent Cloud seamlessly available on Azure, we're also introducing single-sign-on through Azure Active Directory, which enables customers to seamlessly manage their Confluent Cloud clusters on Azure.

Together with pre-built connectors and simplified billing and procurement processes, organizations can now bring real-time, event-driven applications to market faster without extra operational burdens. Quickly Stream Events Across the Azure Ecosystem, Confluent Cloud and the Entire Business with Fully Managed Connectors Manually connecting data from across an organization can quickly become a mess of point-to-point solutions that need to be constantly maintained and fixed. To solve this issue, Confluent has developed an extensive library of pre-built connectors that seamlessly integrate events from many different environments.

With Confluent Cloud, Azure customers access fully managed connectors to popular Azure and Microsoft services, including Azure Functions, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and Microsoft SQL Server. More real-time data can now easily flow to applications for smarter analytics and more context-rich experiences. Adopting new technologies often involves long, cumbersome procurement processes that slow down application development.

In addition, there's also another bill the organization has to manage. With Confluent Cloud available within Azure, there's no need for an additional bill or procurement steps. Confluent Cloud will simply appear as a line item on monthly Azure bills with the option to reallocate existing Azure commits towards Confluent Cloud.

And as always, Confluent Cloud only charges for what is actually streamed and can scale dynamically based on business needs.