> I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable.
I've seen what some corporate customers pay for an enterprise license. It's kind of insane.
I've seen what some corporate customers pay for an enterprise license. It's kind of insane.
"As of March 31, 2021, we had 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, across a wide range of industries, compared to 374 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 50%. As of March 31, 2021, we had 60 customers with $1.0 million or greater in ARR, compared to 33 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 82%."
PrivateLink allows for shared VPC and hypothetically a shared k8s. So the cost structure can be better on the Confluent side. Of course scaling down instance types would make a huge difference, but I don't think that's supported currently. The cheaper option is multi-tenant Kafka clusters.
In general, I think VPC peering is a dead end for use cases where you are connecting two companies networks together. It's not great operationally and puts a lot of security / filtering burden on each party.
PrivateLink is a much better option.