Confluent has announced the latest release of its enterprise streaming platform based off of Apache Kafka. The Confluent platform 5.0 focuses on making infrastructure secure, reliable and easier to manage.

“At Confluent, our vision is to place a streaming platform at the heart of every modern enterprise, helping infrastructure owners get the most out of Kafka and empowering developers to build powerful applications with real-time, streaming data. With a comprehensive streaming platform, companies can better integrate all their disparate data sources into a single source of truth and respond in real time to every event affecting the business,” Raj Jain and Michael Noll from Confluent’s product team, wrote in a blog post.

The new release introduces advanced features for developers such as the ability to understand data in Kafka topics and a new graphical user interface for writing KSQL.

“The latest version of KSQL itself introduces exciting additions, such as support for nested data, user-defined functions (UDFs), new types of joins and an enhanced REST API. Furthermore, Confluent Platform 5.0 includes the new Confluent MQTT Proxy for easier Internet of Things (IoT) integration with Kafka,” according to the post.

The release is also based off of Apache Kafka 2.0, which comes with new functionality and performance enhancements, the company explained.

For operators, the release features a new LDAP authorizer plugin and automatic offset translation. In addition, operators can view broker configurations and inspect consumer lag through the Confluent Control Center.

“Operationalizing enterprise infrastructure is hard, and Apache Kafka is no exception. Our mission at Confluent is to make managing Kafka easy, and the latest release of Confluent Platform helps operators do just that,” the team wrote.