This is great advice IMO, let someone else manage your Kafka at scale. I feel compelled to mention that other Apache Kafka managed services are available, but agree that it makes sense to offload the complexity if possible! Disclosure: work at Aiven, who offer managed Apache Kakfa on whatever cloud you are using.

Thank you for disclosing and not disclaiming.

Why would someone choose Confluent Cloud over the Kafka offerings of Azure/AWS/GCP?

Confluent Cloud is a truly 'fully managed' service, with a serverless-like experience for Kafka. For example, you have zero infra to deploy, upgrade, or manage. The Kafka service scales in and out automatically during live operations, you have infinite storage if you want to (via transparent tiered storage), etc. As the user, you just create topics and then read/write your data. Similar to a service like AWS S3, pricing is pay-as-you-go, including the ability to scale to zero.

Kafka cloud offerings like AWS MSK are quite different, as you still have to do much of the Kafka management yourself. It's not a fully managed service. This is also reflected in the pricing model, as you pay per instance-hours (= infra), not by usage (= data). Compare to AWS S3—you don't pay for instance-hours of S3 storage servers here, nor do you have to upgrade or scale in/out your S3 servers (you don't even see 'servers' as an S3 user, just like you don't see Kafka brokers as a Confluent Cloud user).

Secondly, Confluent is available on all three major clouds: AWS, GCP, and Azure. And we also support streaming data across clouds with 'cluster linking'. The other Kafka offerings are "their cloud only".

Thirdly, Confluent includes many additional components of the Kafka ecosystem as (again) fully managed services. This includes e.g. managed connectors, managed schema registry, and managed ksqlDB.

There's a more detailed list at https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/ if you are interested. I am somewhat afraid this comment is coming across as too much marketing already. ;-)

Disclaimer: I work at Confluent.

Confluent Cloud has some nice point-and-click UI for creating associated Kafka resources like Schema Registries and Connect Clusters.

My preference is MSK but I'm very comfortable with vanilla Kafka in AWS at a good price with auto-updates.

One nice thing about confluent cloud vs MSK is the minimum cost of a confluent cloud cluster is far, far cheaper than the minimal cost of an MSK cluster

Is there a GCP offering that isn't just Confluent Cloud billed via Google?

You can use Pub/Sub Lite: https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/lite/docs

With a Kafka compatibility shim: https://github.com/googleapis/java-pubsublite-kafka

Disclaimer: I work on GCP.

You can get managed Kafka on Aiven (disclaimer: I work there) on GCP, either through the marketplace or directly through Aiven.