Confluent Tableflow is a managed Confluent Cloud feature that automatically materializes Apache Kafka topics as Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake tables, eliminating the need for custom ETL pipelines. It converts Kafka topic data (Avro, JSON Schema, Protobuf) into Parquet files, generates Iceberg/Delta Lake metadata, and publishes tables to catalogs like AWS Glue or Unity Catalog. The post walks through a step-by-step setup using Confluent Cloud, Amazon S3, and AWS Glue, covering cluster creation, schema registration, S3 bucket setup, IAM role configuration, and enabling Tableflow on a topic. Schema evolution is handled automatically via Confluent Schema Registry. Once materialized, tables can be queried from Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, Trino, and BigQuery.
