Real-Time Inventory in Retail with Confluent

This post details building a real-time inventory system for retail using Confluent Cloud. It covers consuming data from various sources (in-store and e-commerce databases) using CDC connectors, processing this data with ksqlDB to create streams for sales and receipts, and then aggregating these into an 'inventory' stream. A ksqlDB table 'stock_on_hand' is constructed to provide a real-time, queryable view of inventory levels per SKU. The post also discusses distributing this real-time inventory data to systems like MongoDB for enhanced fulfillment decisions and customer-facing applications, highlighting the use of over 120 pre-built connectors and stream processing tools like Kafka Streams and Flink.