Confluent widens scope on Flink extensions
As already detailed here on Computer Weekly, data streaming platform company Confuent used its ‘Current 2024’ conference and exhibition to detail its developer extensions and updates for Apache Flink, a technology designed to support ‘stateful computations’ over data streams.
Diving deeper into Confluent’s toolinhg in this space, the company says it has worked to enabling private networking for Flink in order to provide a secure environment for data streaming workloads.
With more data, cloud and hybrid solutions all spiralling in terms of use and complexity, the company insists that private networking is essential for protecting against unauthorised access and cyber threats.
Confluent Cloud now offers private networking support for Flink, providing a layer of security for businesses that need to process data within strict regulatory environments.
By enabling private networking for Flink, Confluent users can boost data security and privacy between Flink and Kafka by safeguarding in-transit data and ensuring secure connections between clients and Flink within a private network.
“Confluent also helps simplify secure network configuration, making it easier to set up private connections without requiring extensive networking expertise. The platform enables and facilitates flexible and secure stream processing by seamlessly joining and processing data across different Kafka clusters, ensuring data accessibility while adhering to strict security protocols,” notes Confluent, in a press statement.
Private networking support is generally available on AWS for Enterprise and Dedicated clusters. Additional cloud platforms will follow.
Coping with clunky workflows
Other new enhancements and extensions clarified at this point include Confluent Extension for Visual Studio Code to streamline workloads and accelerate development cycles.
“Teams working with real-time data platforms like open source Apache Kafka often struggle with fragmented tools, clunky workflows and constant switching between environments and other interfaces. This disjointed experience makes it tough to integrate real-time data into applications, slowing down productivity and innovation. Integrated development environments can make this process much easier and 54% of developers globally use Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the most popular choice for code editing. Confluent Extension for Visual Studio Code simplifies the development process by integrating Confluent directly into teams’ preferred integrated development environment,” notes the company, in a technical product statement.
Confluent Extension for Visual Studio Code enables teams to streamline topic management to create, edit and browse Kafka topics with intuitive tools that simplify debugging and boost efficiency. They can code and debug in one place bywriting, executing and debugging Kafka clients, Flink queries and streaming applications directly in VS Code with enhanced productivity features like code completion. Data and developer teams can also now more seamlessly manage cloud resources to provision and control Confluent Cloud clusters within VS Code. This, says Confluent, reduces complexity and streamlines cloud operations.
Client-Side Field Level Encryption
Data security and privacy are of course top priorities for organisations in regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare and the public sector. These organizations are subject to compliance rules about how sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), can be accessed, moved and stored.
Client-Side Field Level Encryption helps teams protect their most sensitive data by enabling them to encrypt individual fields within their data streams for enhanced security and compliance. Complementing existing Confluent security features, Client-Side Field Level Encryption further reduces the risk of unwanted access by encrypting data on the client side so that even system admins and users with highly privileged access cannot view messages in plaintext,” says Confluent.
With Client-Side Field Level Encryption teams can improve the security of sensitive data and adhere to strict compliance requirements. They can maintain flexible and granular access control of which specific fields to encrypt. There’s also a chance to lower total cost of ownership and operational complexity by reducing the need for topic duplication.
Client-Side Field Level Encryption is currently in limited availability and is expected to become generally available soon for all Confluent Cloud users through the company’s Stream Governance suite.
Confluent brought this announcement forward at its annual user conference Current 2024, held this year in Austin Texas.
