Confluent Inc. said today it’s introducing a new “cluster linking” feature to its event streaming platforms.

The idea is to make event data globally available to businesses, no matter if it resides in multiple clouds or on-premises data centers located in different parts of the world.

The company’s Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud projects are based on the open-source Apache Kafka platform that’s widely used by thousands of companies to store event data — that is, information that’s generated by applications as they’re being used. Kafka provides a way to store these streams of data and direct them to downstream repositories such as data lakes and data warehouses, where they can be analyzed.

Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Kafka, said its Cluster linking is the next stage of its ongoing “Project Metamorphosis” initiative, which is aimed at taking Kafka’s event streaming capabilities and transforming them into a service that supports business operations at scale between servers in on-premises data centers and the cloud.

The company says it’s convinced that there will be a big demand for these capabilities, as a growing number of enterprises look to adopt hybrid cloud or multicloud strategies that involve making use of on-premises data centers and more than one cloud infrastructure provider. Confluent cites research from Gartner Inc. that shows more than 80% of cloud infrastructure users rely on more than one provider and often need to manage data between two different clouds.

Most organizations use Apache Kafka to share data between cloud platforms and on-premises data centers, but connecting different clusters of information is a very tricky job because it requires significant expertise that most companies don’t have.

“The data that today’s businesses are built on has become more distributed geographically and across different cloud environments, making it harder to bring together in a meaningful way,” Confluent co-founder and Chief Executive Jay Kreps said in a statement.

The Cluster Linking feature eliminates those engineering headaches, giving companies an easy way to connect data between clouds and across hybrid architectures. With Cluster Linking, users can replicate data across two or more Kafka clusters with just a few clicks, creating an exact mirror of the source data without needing to engineer, manage and monitor anything.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that today’s computing architectures need greater speed, and that streaming data is a key enabler.

“As streaming technologies mature, they are moving from the single location to a multilocation reality that enterprises need to operate today, and this is what makes Confluent’s Project Metamorphosis so interesting, as it shares the power of streaming across locations,” Mueller said.

In addition to Cluster Linking, the latest release of Confluent Cloud includes the new infinite data retention capability that was announced in July. It effectively removes a cap on how much data can be stored, and for how long, within Confluent Cloud, making the platform much more useful to a wider variety of users.

Confluent said Cluster Linking is already available as a private preview in Confluent Cloud and will be made available as a preview in Confluent Platform 6.0 when it’s released in the coming weeks.

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