Any company with even a moderately complex cloud-based IT infrastructure is going to run into problems if IT doesn't have some sort of "glue" that holds everything together. Apache Kafka, a popular piece of open-source event streaming software, is often used as that glue. Kafka enables asynchronous communication between different systems without tightly coupling those systems together.

One downside of using Kafka is that it's complicated. You can install Kafka anywhere and manage it yourself, but if something goes wrong, it's up to you to fix it. Kafka is cheap to run but costly to manage and maintain, both in terms of time and the potential for lost data.

Confluent (NASDAQ: CFLT), founded by the creators of Kafka, provides a serverless platform that eliminates many of the headaches involved with running Kafka while layering on proprietary features. Confluent's platform clearly resonates with its customers. The company grew total revenue by 36% in the second quarter, and the cloud-based product saw revenue soar 78%. There's clearly plenty of demand for a managed version of Kafka with most of the hassles removed.

Continue reading

Source Fool.com