Kafka – Confluent

Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform that is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is known for its high-throughput, fault-tolerant, and scalable architecture, making it a popular choice for handling large volumes of data streams in real-time.

Confluent is a company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, offering a commercial distribution of Kafka along with additional tools and services to help organizations build, deploy, and manage Kafka-based streaming applications effectively. Confluent Platform extends Kafka with additional features such as Kafka Connect for data integration, Kafka Streams for stream processing, and Control Center for monitoring and management.

In short, Kafka is the underlying technology for building real-time data pipelines, while Confluent provides a comprehensive platform and ecosystem around Kafka to simplify its deployment, management, and development of streaming applications.