Companies are increasingly moving to the cloud, undergoing a transition that is often a multi-year journey across incremental stages. Along this journey, many companies embrace hybrid cloud architectures, either temporarily or permanently, where some applications run on-premises and some run in the cloud. However, unifying data across on-premises and cloud environments is immensely challenging, as most legacy applications are not cloud-ready and have many dependencies and integrations with existing on-premises infrastructure.

With the release of Confluent Platform 7.0, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Cluster Linking to provide an easy-to-use, secure, and cost-effective data migration and geo-replication solution to seamlessly and reliably connect applications and data systems across your hybrid architectures. Cluster Linking delivers three primary benefits to move your data in real time to wherever it suits your business:

1. Accelerate the enterprise journey to cloud by securely, reliably, and effortlessly creating a bridge between cloud and on-prem environments
2. Enable self-service access to data in real time across the business with globally connected clusters that perfectly and reliably mirror data across all of your environments
3. Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational burdens with seamless and cost-effective data geo-replication across Kafka clusters everywhere they reside

In this blog post, we’ll explore each of these benefits of Cluster Linking, along with additional enhancements in this release that accelerate the time to value for your streaming infrastructure with expanded API-driven operations, reduce infrastructure costs by offloading monitoring to a cloud-based solution, and expedite the development of stream processing applications. As with previous Confluent Platform releases, you can always find more details about the features in the release notes and in the video below.