Confluent has announced that Confluent Cloud is now available and ready for enterprise production workloads. It offers a 99.95 percent SLA, making it highly reliable. Key features of Confluent Cloud include the latest Apache Kafka version, high throughput streaming rate, optional support for multiple availability zones, full support for clients offered by Confluent, and a configurable retention period, storage, and throughput rate.

“Confluent Cloud is now production ready and capable of handling enterprise workloads, ideal for companies that are looking for experts to run their Apache Kafka as a Service for them,” said Neha Narkhede, co-founder and CTO at Confluent. “Enterprises and developers can now focus on building applications that provide value to the business, rather than worrying about managing and running Kafka.”

React 16.2 released with new improvements
React 16.2 is now available and features improved support for fragments. Fragments allow developers to return a list of children without having to add extra nodes to the DOM. Previously, children had to be wrapped in an additional element in order to achieve this.

More information is available here.

New Android development course provides deeper knowledge to app developers
Android has announced a new development course offered by the Google Developers Training team. The course, titled Advanced Android Development, will offer a deeper look into building Android apps. It is intended for advanced Java developers that already know the basics of building Android apps. Topics covered include fragments, widgets, sensors, application performance, app localization, and many more.

Microsoft Azure customers can use the TomTom API to build applications
Microsoft Azure customers can now use the TomTom API to build apps. A partnership between the two companies was first announced last December. TomTom’s feedback loop ecosystem provides Azure LBS customers with trusted location data that allows them to put more trust in the data. The applications go beyond connected cars; Azure LBS can be used to improve traffic or reroute drivers away from accidents.

“TomTom equips us with the infrastructure to provide updates quickly and incrementally to our customers, enabling us to provide the most up-to-date information,” states Sam George, partner director of Azure IoT. “We’re excited about this partnership and the benefits it will bring to our millions of Azure users as well as the impact this will have in advancing the technological future forward.”