At the beginning of September Kafka 4.1 was released. It doesn't contain any big surprises but it follows the overall industry direction to improve security and operability.
Noticeable changes:
🔸 Preview state for Kafka Queues (Detailed overview there). It's still not recommended for production, but it's a good time to check how it works and what scenarios it really covers.
🔸 Early access to Stream Rebalance protocol. It moves rebalance logic to the broker side. Initially the approach was implemented for consumers and now it's extended for streams (KIP-1071)
🔸 Ability for plugins and connectors to register their own metrics via Monitorable interface (KIP-877)
🔸 Metrics naming unification between consumers and producers (KIP-1109). Previously Kafka consumer replaces periods (
.) in topic names in metrics with underscores (_), while producer keeps topic name unchanged. Now both producers and consumers preserve original topic name format. Old metrics will be removed in Kafka 5.0.🔸 OAuth jwt-bearer grant type support in addition to
client_credentials (KIP-1139)🔸 Ability to enforce explicit naming for internal topics (like changelog, repartition). A new configuration flag prevents Kafka Streams from starting if any of their internal topics have auto-generated names (KIP-1111).
Full list of changes can be found in release note and official upgrade recommendations.
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