Welcome to the Q2’25 edition of Red Hat’s quarterly newsletter, all about Apache Camel! This series aims to share all the noteworthy Camel goodness from the last quarter, so you don’t miss a thing! Be sure to read the previous editions to catch up on all the exciting updates and insights in Q1 of 2025.
Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4.10
The Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4.10 release significantly enhances the developer experience and modernizes cloud-native integration capabilities. A key highlight is the new unified camel-observability-services component, which standardizes and simplifies the configuration of metrics, health, and telemetry across all runtimes. Developer tooling receives a major boost with Camel JBang introducing interactive messaging commands like camel receive and test infrastructure management via camel infra, while the Kaoto visual designer now supports the full integration lifecycle within VS Code and adds XML IO DSL. The release also strengthens the core framework with numerous component upgrades including camel-kubernetes auto-reloading on configmap changes and improved OAuth2 handling in camel-http and introduces quality-of-life improvements such as a new customize function for easier inline Java configuration and more flexible environment variable syntax, further accelerating the development of robust integrations.
For more details, visit the What’s new in Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4.10 article.
Strengthening Camel's Future with IBM
As of July 1st, 2025, the Camel integration product team has transitioned to IBM. This strategic move, announced by Matt Hicks in February, is designed to accelerate innovation by fostering deeper collaboration with the broader Java ecosystem at IBM. For the developer community, the most important aspect is continuity: the same core SMEs and engineers you trust are continuing to drive the development and support of Camel. We now work across organizational boundaries, ensuring that the project's momentum and deep technical expertise are maintained while benefiting from this aggregated investment in Java technologies.
Crucially, from a customer perspective, support services remain unchanged. The Red Hat build of Apache Camel continues to be fully supported by Red Hat according to its published lifecycle, and the product remains completely open source. In fact, we recently extended long term support to 2030 due to customer demand. The support lifecycle is always subject to additional extension. This evolution strengthens the future of Apache Camel while preserving the reliable support and open-source principles you depend on.
Articles
Dive into the latest developments within Apache Camel 4 through our curated selection of articles.
Prototyping E2E scenarios with Apache Camel
Federico Mariani demonstrates how Apache Camel JBang's Infrastructure Command simplifies the rapid prototyping of complex end-to-end integration scenarios, illustrating its use in setting up local infrastructure services such as AWS S3, Kafka, FTP, ActiveMQ Artemis, and Qdrant, and showcasing how evolving requirements, including integrating AI embeddings, can be incrementally addressed with Camel routes.
Integration Powers AI: Apache Camel at Devoxx UK 2025
Bruno Meseguer, alongside Markus Eisele, discusses at Devoxx UK 2025 how Apache Camel facilitates the integration of systems with agentic AI powered by local LLMs, advocating for the use of battle-tested technologies like Camel for building complex distributed architectures, and showcasing its capabilities in data ingestion, live data mapping with Kaoto, and orchestrating autonomous and event-driven AI agents.
Maarten Vandeperre explores how Apache Camel, especially when combined with Quarkus, provides low-code data routing capabilities for agentic AI systems. Understand how Camel enables seamless integration of Kafka topics with databases, REST APIs, and third-party services, delivering rapid prototyping, blazing-fast startup, and memory efficiency crucial for evolving AI workflows.
Claus Ibsen, Pasquale Congiusti, and Claudio Miranda outline the new features and improvements in Apache Camel 4.13, detailing enhanced management capabilities for internal tasks like BackOff, improved error reporting in FailedToStartRouteException, reduced dependencies for camel run in Camel JBang, fine-grained validation levels in Rest DSL, and new transactional parameters for the camel-kafka component.
Ricardo M. announces the release of Kaoto 2.5, which brings significant UI enhancements, including a new dedicated VS Code perspective, experimental XML import/export support via Camel XML IO, the ability to export integration flows as Markdown documents, and improvements to the configuration form and canvas, all designed to streamline the low-code integration editing experience for Apache Camel.
Claus Ibsen, Pasquale Congiusti, and Gregor Zurowski highlight the new features and improvements in Apache Camel 4.12, including a generated XSD Schema for the camel-xml-io XML DSL, the introduction of a dedicated management port for the camel-main runtime, and various bug fixes and enhancements across Camel JBang, HTTP, Spring Cloud Config, and Spring Boot, as well as the addition of components like camel-dapr and camel-weaviate.
Apache Camel AI: Inference via Model Serving #3: KServe
Tadayoshi Sato introduces the Camel KServe component, explaining how it enables seamless AI model inference within Camel applications by integrating with KServe-compliant model servers and the KServe Open Inference Protocol V2, demonstrating its use for server operations, model metadata retrieval, and performing calculations with a simple model.
Claus Ibsen, Pasquale Congiusti, Federico Mariani, and Gregor Zurowski detail the features and improvements introduced in Apache Camel 4.11, covering updates to Camel Core like the deprecation of the component verifier extension and enhancements to EIPs, alongside new functionalities in Camel JBang, SQL, Telemetry, and Test components, and the addition of new components such as camel-dfdl and camel-opentelemetry2.
Demos and Presentations
See Apache Camel 4 in action in the following new demos and presentations:
- Devoxx UK session: Enterprise Integration Is Dead! Long Live AI-Driven Integration with Apache Camel by Bruno Meseguer and Markus Eisele
- Build own Camel Assistant with up to date Camel knowledge using RAG, Wanaku, Ollama, and LangFlow by Otavio Piske - source code
Upcoming
You may meet us at the upcoming conferences:
July
- July 10-11 - We Are Developers in Berlin, Germany
- Enterprise Integration Is Dead! Long Live AI-Driven Integration with Apache Camel by Bruno Meseguer and Markus Eisele
September
- Sept 3 - JavaZone 2025 in Lillestrøm, Oslo
- AI-driven unstructured data extraction using Apache Camel and LangChain4J by Alexandre Gallice
October
- October 6-9 - IBM TechXchange Conference 2025
- October 6 - Devoxx Belgium
- MCP in Action: Connecting AI to Enterprise Systems by Otavio Piske, Zineb Bendhiba
November
- November 12 - Devoxx Morocco
- MCP in Action: Connecting AI to Enterprise Systems by Otavio Piske
