Confluent launches Streamhouse and makes Lightning Tables available on AWS

Confluent introduced its Streamhouse architecture on November 4, making Lightning Tables generally available on AWS and adding Query as the fifth pillar of its Data Streaming Platform. The other four pillars are Stream, Connect, Process and Govern.

Streamhouse is designed to continuously capture, process, govern and serve current business context for AI agents, applications and analytics. Its query layer, Lightning Tables, is a managed, read-only service that continuously ingests Kafka topic data and materializes it as tables reflecting the latest state.

That availability has limits. Confluent’s documentation says Lightning Tables must run in a supported AWS region on a Basic, Standard, Enterprise or Dedicated Confluent Cloud cluster. The source topic must use a registered Avro, Protobuf or JSON Schema, and enabling the service requires at least the CloudClusterAdmin role.

Customers can query Lightning Tables through the Confluent Cloud console, command-line interface, API and JDBC. Confluent also says AI agents can access the tables over MCP through its Real-Time Context Engine.

Confluent says internal tests measured about 100 milliseconds from new-data creation to serving, query latency of 10 to 100 milliseconds and throughput above 1,000 queries per second. The figures have not been independently benchmarked.

The company positions Streamhouse as a real-time operational layer that works alongside data warehouses and lakehouses rather than replacing them. The opened materials do not enumerate every supported AWS region or give general-availability dates for Lightning Tables on Azure or Google Cloud.