Kafka Monthly Digest: February 2025

March 3, 2025
Mickael Maison
Related topics:
Kafka
Related products:
Streams for Apache Kafka

This 85th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in February 2025.

For last month’s digest, see Kafka Monthly Digest: January 2025.

Releases

There is 1 release in progress:

4.0.0

Progress on Kafka 4.0.0 continued. The first release candidate, RC0, was published on February 22. There are still a handful of opened Jiras, so we can expect a new release candidate in early March. The project is asking the community to test this first release candidate because 4.0.0 contains a high number of changes. You can find the release plan in the wiki.
 

Kafka Improvement Proposals

Last month, the community submitted 7 KIPs (KIP-1133 to KIP-1139). I'll highlight a few of them:

  • KIP-1133: AK Documentation and Website in Markdown: The Apache Kafka website is written in plain HTML which makes it hard and tedious to maintain. This KIP proposes switching to Hugo, a static site generator, so pages can be edited in the Markdown format.
     
  • KIP-1134: Virtual Clusters in Kafka: It's relatively common to run separate workloads within a shared Kafka cluster. Administrators can use quotas and ACLs to isolate tenants but this has limitations. This KIP proposes introducing the concept of Virtual Clusters to logically isolate workloads within a cluster. The goal of Virtual Clusters is to provide strong logical isolation of tenants and provide tools for administrators to manage them.
     
  • KIP-1139: Add support for OAuth jwt-bearer grant type: Since Kafka 3.1, there's a built-in OAuth implementation for the client_credentials grant type. This KIP aims at adding support for the jwt-bearer grant type as defined in RFC 7523.
     

Community Releases

  • node-rdkafka 3.3: Node-rdkafka is a Node.js Kafka client based on librdkafka. This new release is now based on librdkafka 2.8.0 and adds support for Node.js 23.
     

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.

Disclaimer: Please note the content in this blog post has not been thoroughly reviewed by the Red Hat Developer editorial team. Any opinions expressed in this post are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of Red Hat.