Introducing Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink

This post introduces Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink, a fully managed, serverless stream processing service. It details the cloud-native architecture, focusing on serverless principles: elastic autoscaling with scale-to-zero, evergreen runtime and APIs, and usage-based billing. It introduces Flink compute pools as a mechanism for managing elastic compute resources. The post highlights the simplification of Flink SQL integration with Kafka and Schema Registry, and the ability to scale Flink independently from Kafka, enabling cross-cluster data joining.