Streaming information and Kafka specialist Confluent on Monday introduced that it has acquired WarpStream, a Kafka-compatible streaming information resolution. Confluent plans to make use of WarpStream’s cloud-native resolution to fill out its portfolio by providing a brand new service (Confluent WarpStream) that may sit in between its fully-managed Confluent Cloud and self-managed Confluent Platform.
As Confluent co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps informed me, he thinks that what sits in between these two current fashions is what he calls the “bring your own cloud” (BYOC) mannequin.
“There’s definitely a set of people who want some self-managed piece of software. They’re going to go around themselves,” he defined. “And there’s a set of people who want a fully managed cloud. But in some of these organizations, there’s a set of use cases that either have requirements around the data in their environment not being able to leave or just need a fair amount of customization that leaves them doing everything themselves, which is not ideal. So this kind of ‘bring your own cloud’ is like a nice middle position where you can have something that’s like a cloud offering, but it could be in your environment with a fair amount of control.”
WarpStream, Kreps mentioned, constructed the suitable product for this market, and whereas Confluent may’ve tried to adapt one in all its merchandise for these customers, he didn’t suppose that this method would work effectively. “We feel this kind of completes the set of offerings. And this has been one of our beliefs for streaming: Since customers need it across such a broad set of use cases, you have to have the full portfolio of offerings if you really want to get all the streams of data and actually make it useful for customers,” he mentioned.
He additionally famous that no one desires to undertake a brand new protocol for various information streaming use circumstances. The market, for essentially the most half, has standardized on Kafka, even when the underlying expertise continues to evolve. That’s true for WarpStream as effectively, which Kreps famous has achieved a very good job establishing itself with customers within the observability, logging and IoT areas.
Confluent additionally hopes that WarpStream will provide among the prospects who’re utilizing and managing their very own open supply Kafka methods and simple on-ramp onto its platforms.
“We’re excited that the leader in the data streaming space has acquired WarpStream to offer next-gen BYOC to customers,” mentioned Richard Artoul, co-founder and CEO, WarpStream. “Together with Confluent, we will continue to ensure that Kafka-compatible data streaming is accessible to every organization.”
WarpStream launched simply over a yr in the past and had a staff of 13 on the time of the acquisition. In Monday’s announcement, Artoul describes how Kreps reached out to him shortly after the corporate launched. “Over the next few months we met with more people at Confluent to determine if there was a path forward for WarpStream to exist under the Confluent umbrella, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve found one,” he writes.
Clearly, there was a path ahead and whereas the 2 firms didn’t disclose the worth of the acquisition, it’s price noting that WarpStream introduced a $20 million funding spherical led by Greylock and Amplify Companions earlier this yr. “It was a good deal for all involved,” Kreps mentioned.
