Why More Teams Are Starting With Confluent Cloud on AWS Marketplace

Building real-time applications in the cloud means making the right infrastructure choices early. And for many engineering teams leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka® is a key component of their streaming architectures.

While open source Kafka provides a powerful foundation, operating it at scale in production often means navigating challenges when provisioning, scaling, securing, and integrating across environments. That’s where Confluent Cloud comes in. If you’re on AWS, the best part is that it’s on AWS Marketplace, so you can streamline procurement and draw from  your existing commit.

Designed by the original co-creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent offers a fully managed, enterprise-grade platform that gets your team from zero to production faster—with less operational burden and more built-in capabilities from day one. That's why more teams are going straight to Confluent Cloud through AWS Marketplace instead of trying to piece everything together themselves.

Streamlining the Procurement Process

One of the biggest advantages here isn't even technical. It's that you can get started without the usual procurement complexities—no separate vendor relationships to set up and no custom contracts to negotiate.

If you're already using AWS, and especially if you’re part of the Enterprise Discount Program, your Confluent spend counts toward that AWS commitment. Finance appreciates this because it's one less vendor relationship to manage. Engineering teams appreciate it because they can start building instead of waiting through approval cycles.

The billing flows through your existing AWS account, and you may be eligible for $1,000 in free credits to get started. Plus, Confluent provides setup support, including architecture reviews, training, and certification at no additional cost.

Beyond Basic Apache Kafka®

Most managed Kafka services will get you started, but teams often realize they need more as their requirements evolve. This is a common progression: You start simple and then find yourself needing schema management, multiple data source connections, or real-time analytics capabilities.

Confluent Cloud is designed for this evolution. It's built on Kafka but includes the enterprise features that teams typically need as they scale:

• Serverless scaling: The platform handles capacity planning for you. No more late-night alerts because you miscalculated throughput.

• Apache Flink® for stream processing: Need real-time transformations or analytics? It’s built in, with no separate Flink cluster to manage.

• Apache Iceberg™ integration: Kafka topics automatically become queryable tables in your data warehouse. It works with Amazon Redshift and Athena and other analytics tools.

• Connectors: There are 120+ pre-built connectors for AWS services, including S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS. Most common integration scenarios are covered out of the box.

• Schema Registry and Stream Governance: Get centralized schema management with version control, role-based access control (RBAC), and audit logs—the governance features you need for production environments.

• Pay-as-you-go pricing: There’s no up-front capacity planning. Use more, pay more. Use less, pay less. And 99.99% uptime service level agreement (SLA)—because nobody has time for outages.

• Deploy anywhere: Whether you’re operating in a multicloud, hybrid, or your own virtual private cloud, Confluent offers full deployment flexibility to meet your architecture needs.

Confluent Cloud takes care of the heavy lifting, so your team spends less time on operations and more time on building features that matter. And when you factor in the engineering time you're not spending on ops, it results in reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

With Confluent, we make it easier to manage your account. You get one bill that includes compute, storage, networking, observability, and software—so you don't encounter hidden costs for monitoring, connectors, Schema Registry, or integrations.

How Teams Are Using This

Common use cases include modernizing customer data handling, building new AI-powered features, and replacing complex point-to-point integrations with a unified streaming backbone.

• Developers can spin up a cluster in around 10 minutes and start building with whatever tools they prefer (APIs, Terraform, REST APIs, etc.).

• Platform teams get proper observability out of the box, plus they can define everything as code. The enterprise support is robust, which matters when things break at 2 a.m.

• Architects don’t need to worry about whether things will scale or integrate properly with AWS services. Confluent has AWS competencies for data and analytics software and financial software.

If you have existing streaming infrastructure, you can integrate with that too. The whole point is meeting teams where they are while not forcing them to replace everything.

Get Started

The easiest way to know if Confluent on AWS is the right choice for your use case is to try it. Head over to AWS Marketplace, subscribe to Confluent Cloud, and get $1,000 in free credits.

Use your existing AWS spend to deploy Confluent Cloud through AWS Marketplace and start streaming data with production-ready tools in minutes.

If your team needs hands-on guidance, Confluent experts are ready to collaborate every step of the way.

Get started with Confluent Cloud on AWS Marketplace—fully managed Kafka without the operational overhead.

Apache®, Apache Kafka®, Kafka®, Apache Flink®, Flink®, Apache Iceberg™️, and Iceberg™️ are registered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks.