Confluent announced that Apache Kafka as a Service is available with Confluent Cloud for free and also made Kafka serverless. 

With Kafka made serverless, users no longer have to worry about pre-provisioning or managing a cluster, according to Confluent. Users also get elastic scaling without having to change any configuration parameters. 

“When it comes to Confluent Cloud, you don’t have to make all-or-nothing decisions. As you prove the value of Kafka with your first few event streaming applications built on Confluent Cloud, adoption can be incremental. As the value becomes apparent throughout your organization, Kafka adoption will grow, and your environment will scale effortlessly,” Confluent wrote in a post.

HackerRank announces Diversity and Inclusion Center
HackerRank introduced a Diversity and Inclusion Center to try to help teams make better hiring decisions by eliminating unconscious bias.

The reports can hide personal details about an individual and instead show how someone performed in online technical assessments taken on HackerRank’s CodeScreen platform, to put the focus on whether a candidate has the necessary skills for the position. The same can be done for hiding information on the reports hiring teams receive on a candidate’s performance during programming technical interviews taken on HackerRank’s CodePair platform. 

“With a skills-based hiring approach and the D&I Center features, HackerRank enables you and your team to take tangible steps towards building a diverse workforce,” HackerRank wrote in a post.

Stackery announces global partner program
Serverless workflow company Stackery announced the launch of the Stackery Partner Program to empower solution integrators with application development practices to deliver fully-realized serverless applications to customers using the AWS Well-Architected Framework. 

By joining the Stackery Partner Program, users can communicate the complete architecture and workflows to a client while mitigating the infrastructure and implementation details, handoff a complete product instead of a project, and manage and consolidate customer billing directly through the AWS Marketplace. 

“Solutions Integrators are a direct line of communication to those ‘hair-on-fire’ development teams who need Stackery the most because they can now give those customers application delivery superpowers,” said Farrah Campbell, ecosystem director at Stackery. “The Stackery Partner Program will also help Stackery to enter new markets around the world as more businesses realize the powerful capabilities that Stackery and AWS together provide.”

Syncfusion announces on premise and embedded versions of BoldBI
Syncfusion, the provider of cloud-based intelligence solution BoldBI announced the release of the on-premise and embedded versions of its BoldBI dashboard platform.

For the on-premise version, users can take advantage of a multi-tenant mode for SaaS application, an integrated, web-based designer, complete support for custom branding, multi-factor authentication and all prominent features of the Bold BI Cloud solution.

The embedded version shares many of the same features and includes deployment in any form with no development effort and the ability for customers to host their own instances or host on the cloud. 

The full details of the new solution are available here.