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Kafka Monthly Digest: October 2022

November 3, 2022
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Mickael Maison
Principal Software Engineer

This 57th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in October 2022.

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

Releases

There is currently one release in progress, 3.4.0.

3.4.0

On October 6, Sophie Blee-Goldman volunteered to be the release manager for the next minor release, Kafka 3.4.0. The next milestone is KIP freeze currenty targetted for November 16. The release date is expected in December, you can find the release plan with all the details in the wiki.

KIPs

Last month, the community submitted 8 KIPs (KIP-873 to KIP-880). I'll highlight a few of them:

  • KIP-875: First-class offsets support in Kafka Connect. Connect does not currently expose APIs to manage the offsets of connectors. For sink connectors administrators can update offsets of the associated consumer groups but this is particularly troublesome for source connectors that store their offsets in Connect instead. This KIP aims at addressing this limitation by adding endpoints to the Connect REST API to retrieve and reset offsets for all connectors.

  • KIP-878: Autoscaling for Stateless & Statically Partitioned Streams. In Kafka Streams the number of partitions of the input topics is critical as it determines the number of tasks, and hence the degree of parallelism, an application can have. Today if Streams detects the number of partitions changes, it does not handle it and instead shuts down. This KIP's goal is to start adding support for live autoscaling by starting with applications that only use static partitioning.

  • KIP-879: Multi-level Rack Awareness. The rack awareness feature in Kafka allows to automatically spread replicas across racks. This KIP proposes to extend this feature and support multi-level racks. For example if you could have multiple zones in multiple data centers it would allow you to ensure replicas are spread across data centers and zones.

  • KIP-880: X509 SAN based SPIFFE URI ACL within mTLS Client Certificates. Service meshes such as Istio are growing in popularity. Istio issued certificates use the X509v3 Subject Alternative Name extension and SPIFFE to manage identities in Kubernetes environments. This KIP proposes adding a KafkaPrincipalBuilder implementation so Kafka can leverage Istio certificates to authenticate and authorize users.

Community Releases

  • Debezium 2.0. Debezium is a Change Data Capture platform. This new version contains a lot of new features and changes. Debezium now requires at least Java 11. Incremental snapshots can now be stopped, paused and resumed, and you can now select the data to snapshot with wildcards and predicates. There are many other improvements such as support for database multi-tenancy, support for customizing topic names and providing names and versions to all schemas. All connectors have also received significant updates.

Blogs

I selected some interesting blog articles that were published last month:

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

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