Confluent and Your Data: A Partnership You Can Trust

At Confluent, we know that our platform must provide your business with resilience for your mission-critical applications, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Any unplanned outages can result in lost revenue, reputation damage, or fines. As incidents inevitably happen, your organization needs to know how to maximize your availability with our products.

We want to provide clear insights on how we have engineered our Confluent Cloud platform for availability on a global scale and how you can take advantage of capabilities to further improve your resilience and availability.

The Confluent Approach

We take pride in our investments in Confluent Cloud’s resilience and the trust we’ve gained from providing a reliable service for our customers. We manage tens of thousands of Kafka clusters across multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and have built a cloud-native Kafka service that is architected from the ground up to balance performance and availability, and handle failures in the cloud. This means that Confluent Cloud promises high availability with a built-in 99.99% (“four 9s”) uptime SLA for our customers. Confluent Cloud’s SLA covers not only infrastructure but also performance, critical bug fixes, and security updates.

How do we do that? 

• Built-in, multi-zone availability in the product. Confluent ensures high availability by distributing Kafka topic replicas across different availability zones, so two copies remain available even if one zone fails. We also use redundancy in our infrastructure, monitoring workloads to expand or shrink serverless clusters as needed, and enforcing quotas to prevent "noisy neighbors" from impacting user performance.

• Resilience engineered by design. Our platform is architected around a continuous feedback loop of testing, monitoring, and automated response. We proactively validate fault tolerance with failure injection (Chaos Engineering). In production, we constantly monitor service health, using synthetic traffic that simulates customer workflows. This system is designed to automatically detect and remediate issues—such as isolating an impacted node and rebalancing the cluster—to mitigate or prevent customer impact.

You can read more about how Confluent Cloud provides resilience by design on our docs site. 

What Can You Do to Set Up Your Organization for Success?

Technology teams need to balance availability with cost, features, and meeting the needs of their customers every day for every workload. For teams who are building applications on Confluent Cloud, we have some practical suggestions for how to set up your organization for success:

• Audit your availability requirements (e.g., multi-region/multi-zone/multi-CSP) and ensure that your applications can handle load spikes upon restart or load shedding and shifting.

• Integrate Confluent Cloud metrics and monitors with your own observability platform. We provide a comprehensive set of instructions for testing the availability, health, and ensuring that latency is within expectations

• Verify reachability from your Kafka clients to your clusters using our best practices. 

• Learn how our cluster linking allows multi-cloud, multi-region replication of data along with easy, client-side failover in the event of a CSP or region failure. 

• Read more about our best practices for multi-region disaster recovery for Kafka users. 

• Contact your Confluent Account or Support team for more advice on how to optimally configure your environments.

Preparing for Incidents Means Transparency

Confluent is fully committed to building and operating a platform that runs the world’s mission-critical workloads. To do so, we understand that it’s essential to be transparent in how our platform works and what additional steps you can consider when architecting your applications on top of Confluent Cloud. We know that incidents will happen. Together, we can prepare for ongoing business availability with predictable behaviors and tested outcomes.