Confluent Cloud Q1 ’25 introduces Tableflow, Freight clusters, and Flink AI enhancements

This post announces the general availability of Tableflow, which represents Kafka topics and schemas as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake tables for data lakes and warehouses. It also introduces Freight clusters, a cost-effective option for high-throughput, relaxed-latency workloads that write directly to object storage (e.g., S3) for up to 90% cost savings. Enterprise clusters now support Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) on AWS and are increasing their maximum capacity to 32 eCKUs. Apache Flink® enhancements include Flink Native Inference for open source and fine-tuned models, Flink Search for vector database queries (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Pinecone) to support RAG, and built-in ML functions for time-series forecasting and anomaly detection. The Confluent for VS Code extension is now generally available. The Oracle XStream CDC Premium Connector is also now available.