Confluent Developer Courses

What it is

Confluent Developer is Confluent's free learning site. Its course catalogue has short video courses with hands-on exercises on Apache Kafka, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, Apache Flink and Apache Iceberg, grouped into fundamentals, intermediate and advanced levels.

Where to start for data engineering

• Apache Kafka 101 (about 1 hour 16 minutes, 16 modules): events, topics, partitions, brokers, replication, producers, consumers and consumer groups.
• Kafka Connect 101 (about 1.5 hours): moving data between Kafka and databases, object storage and warehouses without writing custom code, including change data capture.
• Schema Registry 101 (about 40 minutes): schemas with Avro, Protobuf or JSON Schema, and schema evolution rules, which is the streaming side of data contracts.
• Apache Flink 101 and Flink SQL, if you move into stream processing.

The fundamentals courses are listed as free, with lengths shown on the catalogue as of 2026-09.

A note on vendor content

Confluent sells a managed Kafka service, Confluent Cloud, and many exercises use it. The concepts in the videos are standard Kafka and apply anywhere. For the exercises you can often use a local Kafka in Docker instead. If you do sign up for a cloud trial, watch the credit and delete clusters when you finish.

Prerequisites

None for Kafka 101 beyond basic programming. Some exercises use Java; others offer Python.

Is it worth your time?

Yes. The instructors explain the ideas clearly and briefly, and Kafka 101 is a better first introduction than most long courses. Pair it with the official Kafka documentation's design section for depth, and with a small project of your own, such as streaming events from a public API into Kafka, then into storage, with a consumer that computes simple windowed counts.

What you can do after

Explain topics, partitions, ordering, offsets and consumer groups clearly; set up a connector to capture changes from a database; describe how schemas protect consumers when producers change. That is enough streaming knowledge for most junior data engineering roles.

Common questions

Is there a certificate? Confluent offers paid certification exams separately. The courses themselves are free.

Do I need an account? Watching is open; some hands-on exercises need a Confluent Cloud account.