This is a first and a big technical achievement as Kafka’s storage and compute layers are tightly coupled. With infinite retention, Confluent has removed a cap on how long and how much data could be stored in its Confluent Cloud, which is its hosted offering based on Kafka that’s available on all public clouds. This removes operational burden for customers.
Companies that want to store oodles of event data in Kafka but don’t want to pay oodles of dollars may be interested in the new “infinite storage” option