Real-Time Context Engine in Confluent Cloud
The Real-Time Context Engine is a fully managed feature in Confluent Intelligence that delivers real-time context from your Apache Kafka® topics to AI agents. You can enable the Real-Time Context Engine on topics that have a registered schema and meet the cluster and region requirements, and your agents can immediately query the most current data through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
How the Real-Time Context Engine works
When you enable the Real-Time Context Engine on a Kafka topic, Confluent Cloud materializes the topic data into a low-latency data-serving layer that Confluent Cloud optimizes for fast lookups. The Real-Time Context Engine continuously ingests new data from the topic so that the table always reflects the latest state. AI agents access the data through MCP tools without interacting directly with Kafka.
Data flows from Kafka topics into the Real-Time Context Engine, which serves real-time context to AI agents through MCP.
The Real-Time Context Engine is fully managed. You don’t need to provision infrastructure, write Kafka consumers, or manage Apache Flink® jobs. You enable the Real-Time Context Engine on a topic, and your agents can start querying data immediately.
Key capabilities
Flexible query support: Query data using key lookups, filters, ranges, and predicates with compound logic. For more information, see Query Data.
Role-based access control: Control who can enable topics and who can query data by using Confluent Cloud RBAC roles. For more information, see Access Control.
Audit logging: Track all access to the Real-Time Context Engine for compliance and governance. For more information, see Auditable Events.
Supported cluster types and regions
The Real-Time Context Engine is available on Basic, Standard, Enterprise, and Dedicated clusters on AWS.
For the current list of supported regions, see Cloud Regions.