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Apache Kafka powers massive, mission-critical data streams at enterprises worldwide. But in many organizations, those streams still behave like dumb pipes: raw JSON or bytes flowing between services, limited governance, weak contracts between teams, and data that’s hard to reuse for analytics or artificial intelligence (AI).

Federal agencies must perform a high-stakes balancing act: Modernize legacy systems, break down data silos, and deliver real-time citizen services—all while operating under strict security and compliance requirements with constrained budgets and staff. Today, we're announcing that Confluent Cloud for Government (CCG) is now available on the FedRAMP Marketplace, with FedRAMP Moderate authorization achieved through the competitive FedRAMP 20x Pilot program.

Data infrastructure growth has a direct, measurable relationship with energy consumption. As organizations ingest more events, retain more data, and deploy more always-on services, infrastructure energy use increases—often faster than business value. For streaming systems, this effect can be amplified by long-running clusters, peak-based sizing, and duplicated pipelines. Sustainability in this context is not about environmental reporting or corporate commitments.

At Confluent, our mission is to provide the world’s most secure and scalable data streaming platform. So we’re aware and planning for a future where the threat of a large-scale, cryptographically relevant quantum computer is able to break the public key cryptographic algorithms in use today. In fact, the Quantum-Safe Working Group of the Cloud Security Alliance set April 14, 2030, as the deadline by which companies should have their post-quantum infrastructure in place.

Queues for Kafka is now in General Availability (GA) on Confluent Cloud and is coming soon to Confluent Platform, coinciding with the Apache Kafka 4.2 release. This milestone brings production-ready queue semantics and elastic consumer scaling natively to Kafka through KIP-932, enabling organizations to consolidate their messaging infrastructures while gaining elastic consumer scaling and per-message processing controls. Get started.

As data architectures evolve, we are seeing a fundamental shift from systems designed to report on the past to systems designed to influence the future. At the heart of this shift are two critical, interconnected concepts: As organizations pursue more data-driven decision making, the gap between insight and action has become a competitive constraint. Together, real-time decisioning and autonomous data systems represent the evolution of real-time data systems—where insight flows directly into action.

Hey, fellow Apache Kafka developers! It’s time for another update on the Confluent client ecosystem. Following our recent architectural milestones, we’re excited to announce the release of librdkafka 2.13.0, which powers the latest versions of our Python, JavaScript, .NET, Go, and C/C++ clients. In this release, you’ll find numerous improvements to the Python experience as well as critical security and Schema Registry enhancements for everyone.

The ideal data streaming platform empowers you to handle every type of data movement with confidence. In our first Confluent Cloud launch of 2026, we’re delivering on the promise of Apache Kafka for any workload, at any scale.