By Siddartha Reddy Katukuri, HEXstream data integration engineer

In today’s AI-driven, API-first, real-time digital economy, utilities can’t afford to miss an event. Event-driven architecture is the nervous system of modern enterprises and it’s evolving fast.

Businesses are now demanding more than just data transport; we now need smart decision-making on every event. With the rise of generative AI, LLM-powered automation, and
real-time analytics, event data is no longer just "streamed," it’s interpreted, enriched and acted upon instantly.

This is a tremendous development.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) streaming offers a scalable, managed platform to fuel
these intelligent, high-velocity pipelines, and do so efficiently and cost-effectively.

OCI streaming with Kafka: What’s new and why it matters

Oracle’s latest version currently supports Kafka 3.7 and a roadmap to adopt Kafka 4.0 soon means you get access to cutting-edge features:

Kafka Kraft mode—Eliminate the complexity of ZooKeeper. Kafka’s KRaft mode simplifies deployment, improves fault-tolerance, and is perfect for container-native environments like OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes.

Tiered storage—Optimize costs by moving cold data to OCI Object Storage, enabling longer retention without bloating your cluster.

Oracle is the smartest Kafka platform for AI

OCI Infrastructure offers a fully managed interface, delivering all the tools you need under one platform without the operational complexity, which enables you to:

·     Seamlessly use Kafka clients and ecosystem tools

·     Dynamically scale with up to 24 brokers per cluster

·     Secure with IAM, private endpoints, and audit trails

·     Achieve OCI Data Flow (Apache Spark) for in-stream transformation

·     Create autonomous databases and lakehouses in order to land, store and query stream data

·     Use Oracle AI to apply GenAI and ML models to live event streams

AI-ready streaming for personalization

AI-powered customer experience, built on real-time Kafka infrastructure, is the future. With
OCI + Kafka:

·     Users can clickstream events that are published in real-time

·     OCI AI agents can enrich the data and score user intent

·     Users can perform vector-search match behavior with past preferences

Why it's the right time

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure streaming cuts infra costs while scaling faster. It reduces integration complexity while enabling users to build real-time, AI-powered pipelines.

If you want to master events while enabling AI-first automation, it’s time to rethink how you stream. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you gain the scalability of Kafka, the intelligence of Oracle AI, and the reliability of enterprise cloud all in one cost-effective platform.