Hey all, I’m happy to announce that Jun Rao, Neha Narkhede and I are creating a company around Kafka called Confluent. We are planning on productizing the kind of Kafka-based real-time data platform we built out at LinkedIn. We are doing this because we think this is a really powerful idea and we felt there was a lot to do to make this idea really take root. We wanted to make that our full time mission and focus.
There is a blog post that goes into a little more depth here: http://blog.confluent.io/ LinkedIn will remain a heavy Kafka user and contributor. Combined with our additional resources from the funding of the company this should be a really good thing for the Kafka development effort. Especially when combined with the increasing contributions from the rest of the development community. This is great news, as there is a lot of work to do. We'll need to really focus on scaling this distributed development in a healthy way. One thing I do want to emphasize is that the addition of a company in the Kafka ecosystem won’t mean meddling with open source. Kafka will remain 100% open source and community focused, as of course is true of any Apache project. I have been doing open source for a long time and strongly believe it is the right model for infrastructure software development. Confluent is just getting off the ground now. We left LinkedIn, raised some money, and we have an office (but no furniture yet!). None the less, f you are interested in finding out more about the company and either getting help with your Kafka usage or joining us to help build all this, by all means reach out to us, we’d love to talk. Wish us luck! -Jay
