Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink Billing

To run Apache Flink® SQL, you create a compute pool and run statements within it. Confluent charges you for the CFUs your statements consume while they run, not for the size of the pool: the pool scales elastically to meet demand, so your cost depends on actual CFU usage per minute, not provisioned capacity. With this serverless architecture, you’re charged only for the minutes when your statements are running.

You can configure the maximum size of a compute pool to limit your spending.

CFUs

A CFU is a logical unit of processing power that Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink uses to measure the resources it consumes. Each Flink statement consumes a minimum of 1 CFU-minute but can consume more depending on the needs of the workload.

CFU billing

Confluent measures the total number of CFUs you consume in a compute pool every minute. Usage is reported in CFU-hours so that hourly pricing applies to your minute-by-minute consumption. Prices vary by cloud region.

For current CFU prices, see the Confluent Cloud pricing page.

Networking fees

Using Flink to read and write data from Apache Kafka® doesn’t add any new Flink-specific networking fees, but you’re still responsible for the Confluent Cloud networking rates for data that you read from and write to your Kafka clusters. These are existing Kafka costs, not new charges that Flink creates.

Cost management

You can’t define the number of CFUs an individual statement requires. Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink counts CFUs for you. You can configure the maximum size of a compute pool to limit your spending by setting a parameter named MAX_CFU, which sets an upper limit on the hourly spend on the compute pool. If the size of the workload in a pool exceeds MAX_CFU, Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink rejects new statements. Existing workloads continue running but can experience increased latency.

Note

You can increase the MAX_CFU value after you create a compute pool, but you can’t decrease the initial MAX_CFU value. For more information, see Update a compute pool.

You can set a minimum CFU limit for an individual statement with a Baseline CFU. A statement with a Baseline CFU is billed for at least that many CFUs even when it’s idle. You’re billed for the minimum plus any usage that exceeds it. Setting a Baseline CFU can increase the number of CFUs you’re billed for. For more information, see Set a Baseline CFU for a Flink SQL Statement.

For worked pricing examples covering interactive queries and multiple concurrent streaming statements, see Flink SQL.