Building CDC Pipelines With Apache Flink®

A streaming approach allows you to "shift left," processing and governing data closer to the source. Instead of running separate, costly ELT jobs in multiple downstream systems, you process the data once in-stream with Flink to create a single, reusable, high-quality data product. This improves data quality, reduces overall processing costs and risks, and gets trustworthy data to your teams faster.

Apache Flink® is the de facto standard for stateful stream processing, designed for high-performance, low-latency workloads—making it ideal for CDC. Its ability to handle stateful computations allows it to accurately interpret streams of inserts, updates, and deletes to maintain a correct, materialized view of data over time. Confluent offers a fully managed, serverless Flink service that removes the operational burden of self-management.

Data consistency is maintained by processing CDC events in-flight to filter duplicates, join streams for enrichment, and aggregate data correctly before it reaches any downstream system. Confluent's platform integrates Flink with Stream Governance, including Schema Registry, to define and enforce universal data standards, ensuring data compatibility, quality, and lineage tracking across your organization.

When your CDC pipeline is integrated with Confluent Schema Registry, it can automatically and safely handle schema evolution. This ensures that changes to the source table structure—like adding or removing columns—do not break downstream applications or data integrity. The platform manages schema compatibility, allowing your data streams to evolve seamlessly.

A fully managed service eliminates the significant operational complexity, steep learning curve, and high in-house support costs associated with self-managing Apache Flink®. With Confluent, you get a serverless experience with elastic scalability, automated updates, and pay-as-you-go pricing, allowing your developers to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. In addition, native integration between Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® and pre-built connectors allow teams to build and scale fast.

Confluent Cloud provides first-class support for Debezium, an open source distributed platform for change data capture. Pre-built connectors can automatically interpret the complex structure of Debezium CDC event streams, simplifying the process of integrating with Kafka and Flink.