Confluent has had a cloud offering for years now but made the self-serve options more available. Now the basic tier pricing has been changed to only be billed on data transferred instead of provisioned throughput. Kafka is the same between both services but Confluent provides extra like KSQL, Schema Registry and some of their other tools.

https://medium.com/@stephane.maarek/an-honest-review-of-aws-..., though this is mainly written pre-GA so I'm not sure how accurate it is now.

I've recently gotten quotes from Confluent Cloud after doing some pricing on AWS for our setup, and they are far more expensive than MSK, but you do get more bells and whistles. It's more cost-effective for us to run our own, which also gives us more flexibility when it comes to monitoring and alerting around the environment.

Does this mean that confluent will soon close the license in front of the public cloud providers?