Powering Event-Driven Architectures on Microsoft Azure with Confluent

When you order a pizza, what if you knew every step of the process from the moment it goes in the oven to being delivered to your doorstep? Event-Driven Architecture is a modern, data-driven approach that describes “events” (i.e., something that just happened). A real-time data infrastructure enables you to provide such event-driven data insights in real time. Israel Ekpo (Principal Cloud Solutions Architect, Microsoft Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft) and Alicia Moniz (Cloud Partner Solutions Architect, Confluent) discuss use cases on leveraging Confluent Cloud and Microsoft Azure to power real-time, event-driven architectures. As an Apache Kafka® community stalwart, Israel focuses on helping customers and independent software vendor (ISV) partners build solutions for the cloud and use open source databases and architecture solutions like Kafka, Kubernetes, Apache Flink, MySQL, and PostgreSQL on Microsoft Azure. He’s worked with retailers and those in the IoT space to help them adopt processes for inventory management with Confluent. Having a cloud-native, real-time architecture that can keep an accurate record of supply and demand is important in keeping up with the inventory and customer satisfaction. Israel has also worked with customers that use Confluent to integrate with Cosmos DB, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Cognitive Search, and other integrations within the Azure ecosystem. Another important use case is enabling real-time data accessibility in the public sector and healthcare while ensuring data security and regulatory compliance like HIPAA. Alicia has a background in AI, and she expresses the importance of moving away from the monolithic, centralized data warehouse to a more flexible and scalable architecture like Kafka. Building a data pipeline leveraging Kafka helps ensure data security and consistency with minimized risk.The Confluent and Azure integration enables quick Kafka deployment with out-of-the-box solutions within the Kafka ecosystem. Confluent Schema Registry captures event streams with a consistent data structure, ksqlDB enables the development of real-time ETL pipelines, and Kafka Connect enables the streaming of data to multiple Azure services.EPISODE LINKSConfluent on Azure: Why You Should Add Confluent to Your Azure ToolkitIzzyAcademy Kafka on Azure Learning Series by Alicia MonizWatch the video version of this podcastJoin the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)SEASON 2 Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed Music by Coastal Kites Artwork by Phil Vo  🎧 Subscribe to Confluent Developer wherever you listen to podcasts. ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube, and hit the 🔔 to catch new episodes.👍 If you enjoyed this, please leave us a rating. 🎧 Confluent also has a podcast for tech leaders: "Life Is But A Stream" hosted by our friend, Joseph Morais.