Confluent’s Newest Features in Q3 2021

This post announces the general availability of fully managed Cluster Linking, a new geo-replication technology that directly connects independent Kafka clusters across regions and clouds. It highlights the simplification of data movement, increased reliability for global deployments, and unification of cloud environments. The post contrasts Cluster Linking with older replication tools like MirrorMaker 2 and Replicator, emphasizing its advantages in reducing infrastructure costs, operational burden, and architectural complexity. It details how Cluster Linking enables global data replication, regional disaster recovery, and simplified workload migrations by providing perfectly mirrored and globally consistent topic replication with offset preservation and support for non-Java consumers.