Article

Kafka Monthly Digest: March 2022

April 7, 2022
Kafka
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Mickael Maison
Principal Software Engineer
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This is the 50th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, and covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in March 2022.

For last month’s digest, please see Kafka Monthly Digest: February 2022.

Releases

On March 14, I released Kafka 3.0.1. This bugfix version addresses 29 JIRA tickets, including a few blockers. For more details, see the release notes or the release plan.

Two upcoming releases are in progress:

  • 3.1.1: On March 9, Tom Bentley volunteered to run the Kafka 3.1.1 bugfix release. It is expected to release in April and you can find the release plan on the Kafka wiki.

  • 3.2.0: The release process continues for this version. The feature freeze happened on March 16 and Bruno Cadonna cut the 3.2 branch on March 21. The first release candidate is expected in mid-April. For more details, you can find the release plan on the Kafka wiki.

Kafka Improvement Proposals

During the past month, the community submitted three Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIP-824 to KIP-826). Let's take a quick look at them:

  • KIP-824: Allowing dumping segment logs limiting the batches in the output: This KIP aims to improve the kafka-dump-log.sh tool. This tool is useful for letting administrators inspect the raw data stored in Kafka. Currently the tool dumps only whole segments, so it can be cumbersome to use with large segments. This KIP proposes adding a new --max-bytes option to specify how much data to dump from the specified segment.

  • KIP-825: Introduce a new API to control when aggregated results are produced: In Kafka Streams, when using windowed aggregations, an aggregated record is emitted for every single input record. This KIP proposes a mechanism, via a new EmitStrategy interface, to wait until a window closes and then emit a single output record. This change can reduce the downstream load for systems that want to use only the final results.

  • KIP-826: Define platforms supported: Currently, Kafka does not make any official statement regarding the hardware platforms it supports. This KIP proposes updating the documentation to explicitly mention the supported platforms. The KIP would also introduce a process for onboarding new hardware platforms.

Community releases

None of the projects I follow have made a release in March. If you know a popular open source community project that I don't cover that would be relevant to the Kafka community, please let me know.

Kafka blogs and articles

Here are a few of the most noteworthy blogs and articles that were published last month:

To learn more about Kafka, visit Red Hat Developer's Apache Kafka topic page.

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