Big-data company Confluent Inc. is introducing a free tier to its cloud-based Apache Kafka offering, giving enterprises an easy way to get started with the popular open source data streaming platform.

Confluent was founded in 2014 by former LinkedIn Corp. engineers who helped create the original Apache Kafka project. Kafka is an event streaming platform that enables enterprises to transport massive volumes of data to and from, and between their applications.

It transports data with a high degree of reliability and low latency, a powerful combination that has made it a hit in the enterprise. It lends itself to everything from ingesting website traffic metrics to collecting soil measurements recorded by sensors in a far-flung field.

The Confluent Platform is a customized distribution of the software. It includes extra reliability features, ready-to-use integrations with popular enterprise applications and advanced analytics tools. One of the standout capabilities is an engine for performing real-time analytics on data processed by Kafka.

Confluent launched its cloud service earlier this year, filling an important gap in its product portfolio by giving customers an alternative to its on-premises offering. The main benefits of using the service via the cloud are that there’s less complexity involved when it comes to setting everything up, greater scalability and variable pricing based upon consumption.

With the launch of its free tier, Confluent is giving customers access to $50 worth of resources per month for up to three months, which should be plenty for new users to get started with. Confluent hopes that those new users will then start paying to use the service on a more regular basis.

Confluent Cloud is available on all major public cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and now, Microsoft Azure.

Image: Confluent