Confluent Platform is a full-scale streaming platform that enables you to easily access, store, and manage data as continuous, real-time streams. Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, Confluent Platform is an enterprise-ready platform that completes Kafka with advanced capabilities designed to help accelerate application development and connectivity. Confluent Platform enables transformations through stream processing, simplifies enterprise operations at scale, and meets stringent architectural requirements. Confluent Platform is software you download and manage yourself. Any Kafka use cases are also Confluent Platform use cases. Confluent Platform is a specialized distribution of Kafka that includes additional features and APIs. Many of the commercial Confluent Platform features are built into Kafka brokers as a function of Confluent Server. By integrating historical and real-time data into a single, central source of truth, Confluent makes it easy to build an entirely new category of modern, event-driven applications, gain a universal data pipeline, and unlock powerful new use cases with full scalability, performance, and reliability.