Survey Reveals Apache Kafka® will be Mission-Critical to 90 Percent of Data and Application Infrastructures in 2018

The annual Apache Kafka Report shows tremendous growth across a variety of use cases as companies reimagine industries

Palo Alto, Calif. – June 26, 2018 – Confluent, provider of the leading streaming platform based on Apache Kafka®, today announced the results of the third annual survey of the Kafka community. The survey shows how and why companies are adopting streaming platforms to build event-driven architectures, and the bottom line impact they have on the business.

In order to respond more effectively to the increasing demands of current and future business, technology leaders must support real-time business decisions. Apache Kafka meets this need by acting as the central nervous system for the modern enterprise. This streaming platform helps businesses improve customer experiences, reduce risk and evolve faster to deliver on the promise of digital business transformation.

To download the full report, visit: cnfl.io/2018-apachekafka-report.

Key findings include:

• Kafka adoption is rapidly growing. This year, the vast majority of organizations (94%) plan to deploy new applications or systems using Kafka. Two thirds (67%) plan to deploy between 1 and 10 new applications or systems.
• Building distributed systems is challenging. However, Apache Kafka provides a powerful toolkit for putting together services as a set of scalable, decoupled components. For six out of ten organizations, their microservices architecture (63%) relies on Kafka to preserve and communicate state, more than twice as many as last year (29%).
• Truly data-driven organizations keep events at the center of the business. 90 percent of respondents said Apache Kafka is mission critical to power the central nervous system across many different applications and use cases.

“It’s amazing to see how much the Kafka community has grown over the years and the many different ways companies are implementing it to change their business,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO of Confluent and original co-creator of Apache Kafka. “As companies need to compete in this digital-first world, they are moving toward the cloud, embracing stream processing and replacing legacy technology. Kafka powers these transformations by putting data at the heart of the business and unifying everything that happens into streams of real-time events.”

About the 2018 Apache Kafka Report

Confluent surveyed over 600 Apache Kafka users from 59 countries in order to better understand the behavior, usage and attitudes of Kafka’s growing user base. Respondents were most often data architects (36%), developers (26%), or data engineers (13%). They came from a variety of industries – most frequently computer systems (20%), financial services (12%) and media and entertainment (10%). Companies ranged in size: while 30% grossed between $1 and $49 million annually, nearly as many (25%) grossed $1 billion or more per year.

Resources

• Read the full report here: cnfl.io/2018-apachekafka-report.
• See the 2017 report here: https://www.confluent.io/2017-apache-kafka-report/.
• Don’t miss Kafka Summit San Francisco taking place October 16-17, 2018. For details, visit: https://kafka-summit.org/events/kafka-summit-san-francisco-2018/.

About Confluent

Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, provides the leading streaming platform that enables enterprises to maximize the value of data. With a streaming platform that spans to the edges of an organization and captures data into streams of real-time events, businesses in industries such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, financial services, technology and media are able to respond in real time to every customer event, transaction, user experience and market movement whether on premises or in the cloud. Backed by Benchmark, Index Ventures and Sequoia, Confluent is based in Palo Alto, California. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Open Source at www.confluent.io/download.

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