Confluent Cloud allows us to harness the full power of cloud and provide a Kafka service that is
substantially better than Kafka alone. In fact, across a number of performance metrics, Confluent
Cloud is now 10x better than self-managed open source Kafka or semi-managed services.

Confluent Cloud offers Apache Kafka’s protocol and is 100% compatible with the open source
ecosystem. And since it’s powered by Kora, the Apache Kafka engine purpose-built for the cloud,
virtually every layer in the stack has been transformed, from how data is routed over the network, how
requests are processed, how data is stored, where data is placed and when it is moved to how all of this
is controlled and observed at scale.