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Supply chain disruption. Pandemics and medical crises. Climate change. Events that were once “black swans” are now near-everyday occurrences for citizens worldwide—and governments are facing growing pressure to provide effective public services in response. In the past, the ability to access, process, and apply data to make informed decisions about complex issues was crucial to creating effective public services.

Confluent has been instrumental in enabling customers from various industries to develop real-time stream processing solutions using Apache Kafka. While many of these use cases demand low-latency and real-time processing, stream processing is also increasingly being utilized for ingesting logging and telemetry data. This type of data typically features a high ingest rate, but allows for a higher tolerance for end-to-end processing time.

Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic, is a new standard that simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) integrations by providing a secure, consistent way to connect AI agents with external tools and data sources. When we saw MCP’s potential, we immediately started exploring how we could bring real-time data streaming into the mix. With our long history of supporting open source and open standards, building an MCP server was a natural fit.

At Confluent, we’re committed to building the world's leading data streaming platform, which gives you the ability to stream, connect, process, and govern all of your data, and make it available wherever it’s needed—however it’s needed—in real time. Today, we're excited to announce the release of Confluent Platform 7.9! This release builds upon Apache Kafka 3.9, reinforcing our core capabilities as a data streaming platform.

Our Q1 Confluent Cloud launch comes to you from Current Bengaluru, where data streaming industry experts have gathered to showcase how real-time streaming with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Apache Iceberg is enabling generative artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and helping their organizations take innovation to the next level.

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 4.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent ones. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

Toxic player behavior will drive players away from an otherwise successful game. While friendly banter and trash talk can build camaraderie, context matters—as what’s okay among longtime friends might be harassment to a stranger. How can studios create a positive atmosphere for all while still allowing friends to have a little fun at each other’s expense?

In our 2024 Data Streaming Report, we surveyed 4,110 IT leaders about the pivotal role that data streaming plays in their businesses. Of the respondents, 91% indicated that data streaming platforms (DSPs) are critical or important for achieving their data-related objectives—a result that comes as no surprise. Most IT teams—from architecture and integration teams to application and data engineers—that are using Confluent’s DSP get it.