Scalable Stream Processing with Confluent’s Apache Flink®

As the amount of data produced by an increasingly digital world has exploded, so has the need for scalable platforms capable of analyzing this data in real-time. Our customers tell us this over and over again:

Getting actionable, accurate insights from data in real-time is a competitive advantage.

This is true whether the client’s business involves trading financial instruments, managing large fleets of vehicles, or providing customized offers to consumers considering large durable goods purchases on the web.

Confluent Kafka provides the scale and resilience required to capture, process, and retrieve data in the form of event streams. Apache Flink is a distributed processing engine that provides the scale and resilience required to perform stateful computation on such data streams.

Ness has been building large-scale streaming analytics platforms using Kafka and Flink since 2016. Our financial services and capital markets clients were among the first large enterprises to require complex analytical computations on millions of events at low latency.

We are thrilled to partner with Confluent on the general availability of the industry’s only cloud-native, serverless Apache Flink® service. Available directly within Confluent’s data streaming platform alongside a cloud-native service for Apache Kafka®, the new Flink offering is now ready for use on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

We believe Confluent’s Flink product offers a feature-rich and easily consumable Flink platform for enterprise customers. Confluent’s market-leading Kafka offering combined with Flink offers several compelling advantages:

• Unified Stream and Batch Processing: Particularly scenarios that require filters, joins, and enrichment across wide data streams at low latencies such as fleet management (Electric vehicles), freight tracking, predictive maintenance (auto, marine and aerospace), telecommunications (5G RAN telemetry analytics), capital markets (algorithmic trading, regulatory reporting), financial services (payments & anti-fraud).
• Scalability and Performance: Flink offers near linear scalability for stateful computations across unbounded streams. Its resource efficiency, low latency, and robust state handling enables high-performance stream processing at scale, on the most demanding workloads.
• Resilience and Supportability: By integrating Kafka and Flink into a complete data streaming platform, Confluent simplifies the management of these complex technologies while providing enterprise-grade security, data governance, and observability.

Confluent has recognized Ness’ commitment to our partnership by naming Ness an Elite Confluent Partner and the SI Partner of the Year for 2023.

Ness has years of experience developing Flink applications, empowering organizations to process and analyze vast amounts of streaming data in real-time, to drive business results. A few examples are below.

Discovering the Power of Apache Flink: Real Stories of Ness Customers

Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), the world’s largest clearinghouse partnered with Ness to transition its Risk and Margin calculation system from a batch-based process to a near-real-time, event-driven system. Leveraging cloud-based streaming architecture with Kafka and Flink, they achieved the scalable, high-performance data processing required to handle price updates and position changes on over 2 million instruments each second. The end results? Overnight batches processed in minutes, quick intra-day risk calculations, and unparalleled control over position aggregation and netting. Download our case study here.

Similarly, Western Asset Management, one of the world’s leading fixed-income investment firms, transitioned its pre-trade compliance platform from a relational database-centered design to a near-real-time, event-driven system. Utilizing Kafka and Flink, Western achieved near-perfect parallel scaling across millions of simultaneous calculations, reducing processing time from minutes to sub-seconds. With demand-responsive scaling, infrastructure costs were kept in check, while providing the scalability required to meet peak demand at crucial points during the trading day. Download our case study here.

A global leader in fraud detection solutions that has been a Ness customer for over a decade wished to revamp its product offering. Ness designed and built an event-driven architecture capable of handling high volumes with low latency. Leveraging Kafka as a unified event backbone and Flink for flexible fraud detection models, the client saw increased interest and adoption of its fraud prevention product. The solution, deployed on their SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, not only enhanced fraud detection but also drove business strategy and the company’s valuation.

These success stories underscore the transformative power of Confluent and Ness partnership in empowering organizations to harness the full potential of streaming data. The Confluent and Ness co-delivery model is designed to maximize synergies and facilitate seamless integration with real-time data streams, enabling intelligent enterprise-wide responses. This partnership leverages advanced technology and domain knowledge, empowering organizations to stay ahead of the curve and unlock new possibilities through streaming data analytics.

Learn more about how Ness can help you with Confluent’s cloud-native, serverless Apache Flink® service—now generally available on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.