Pipeline to the Cloud - On-Premises Data Streaming for Cloud Analytics

This post details the architecture and benefits of offloading data from on-premises transactional databases to cloud analytics platforms using Confluent Platform and Kafka. It specifically demonstrates a pipeline for ingesting data from SQL Server and MySQL into Snowflake and Amazon S3 with Athena. Key technical components highlighted include Kafka Connect with Debezium SQL Server CDC Connector and Snowflake Kafka Connector. It also introduces stream processing with ksqlDB for data denormalization before loading into Snowflake, and discusses the advantages of event streaming over traditional batch ETL.