If you’re a fan of Kafka like I am, you might know that Kafka 4.0 was officially released last week. Except the fact that it's the first release that operates entirely without Apache Zookeeper, it also contains some other interesting changes:
✏️ The Next Generation of the Consumer Rebalance Protocol (KIP-848). The team promised significant performance improvements and no “stop-the-world” rebalances anymore.
✏️ Early access to the Queues feature (I already described it there )
✏️ Improved transactional protocol (KIP-890) that should solve the problem with hanging transactions
✏️ Ability to make a whitelist of OIDC providers via
org.apache.kafka.sasl.oauthbearer.allowed.urls property✏️ Custom processor wrapping for Kafka Streams (KIP-1112) that should simplify common code usage across different streams topologies
✏️ Values for some default parameters were changed. Actually it's a public contract change with potential issues during upgrade, so need to be careful with that - KIP-1030
✏️ A big housekeeping work was done, so the version removes a lot of deprecations:
- v0 and v1 message formats were dropped (KIP-724)
- kafka clients versions <=2.1 are not supported anymore (KIP-1124)
- APIs and configs deprecated prior version 3.7 were removed
- Old MirrorMaker (MM1) was removed
- Old java versions support was removed, now clients require Java 11+, brokers - Java 17+
Full list of changes can be found in release notes and official upgrade recommendations.
New release looks like a significant milestone for the community 💪. As always, before any upgrade I recommend to wait for the first patch versions (4.0.x), which will probably contain fixes for the most noticeable bugs and issues.
#engineering #news #kafka