appendix B Confluent resources
B.1 Confluent Cloud
Confluent Cloud is a resilient, scalable, streaming data service based on Apache Kafka®, delivered as a fully managed service. Confluent Cloud allows you to quickly scale up a Kafka cluster without consuming any resources on your laptop. Combined with the Confluent command-line interface (CLI), you can quickly and easily spin up a cluster, create and delete topics, and enable Schema Registry. You can also take the latest product from Confluent, Flink SQL, for a spin.
Readers of this book can try Confluent Cloud out for free with the code “KAFKASTREAMSBOOK”, which gives you $100 in free credit. You can find Confluent Cloud at https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/.
B.2 Confluent command-line interface
The Confluent CLI interface is a powerful tool that makes working with Confluent Cloud very easy. You can create and delete clusters and consume from and produce to topics from the command line. To install the CLI tool, users of macOS or Linux can use the command brew install confluentinc/tap/cli, but all major operating systems are supported. Go to http://mng.bz/KZMZ for complete instructions on the different options available for installing the CLI.