Kafka Monthly Digest: October 2026

Releases

4.4.0

Kafka brokers and clients

• Mechanism for clients to handle DNS issues and re-bootstrap instead of failing. (KIP-909)
• Support for dead letter queue for share groups. (KIP-1191)
• Support for IP range ACLs using CIDR notation. (KIP-1276)
• New Linux IO metrics for better tracking of page cache and disk usage. (KIP-1291)
• New Admin API to unregister KRaft controllers. (KIP-1312)
   

Kafka Connect

• New configuration, internal.topics.automatic.creation.enable, to specify whether Kafka Connect should automatically create its internal topics or not. (KIP-1209)

Kafka Streams

• Support for transactional state stores can be enabled using enable.transactional.statestores. (KIP-892)
• Add headers to StreamPartitioner. (KIP-1321)
• New mechanism to expose Streams topologies to the broker side. (KIP-1331)
• Support for broker-side custom assignors. (KIP-1357)

4.3.2
 

4.5.0
 

Kafka Improvement Proposals

• KIP-1381: Allow Brokers to Disable Compression Types for Client Writes: Kafka supports multiple compression algorithms using third-party libraries and all of them apart from gzip include native code. Security issues in native code can be critical and Kafka depends on the community of each library to address issues in a timely manner. As an attempt to mitigate this risk, this KIP proposes enabling cluster administrators to specify which compression algorithms to enable. 
   

• KIP-1383: Standard record headers for content type: This KIP proposes introducing standard headers to describe the record key and value types. It would include default content types such as int, long, string, etc, and also allow custom types via a MIME special value.
   

• KIP-1389: Surface effective group configurations to clients: When using the new group protocol, via consumer, share consumer or Streams, several group configurations are computed by the coordinator and may override values configured on the clients. At the moment, not all the configurations are exposed back to the clients and this can make troubleshooting issues harder. This KIP aims at providing a mechanism to expose all the group configurations that are effectively used by the coordinator when handling a group.

Community Releases

• strimzi-kafka-operator 1.3.0: Strimzi is a Kubernetes Operator for running Kafka. This release adds support for Kafka 4.2.2. It also introduces 2 new features in early access, an integration with cert-manager for issuing certificates, and a mechanism to configure internal cluster security (authentication and authorization).
   

• Cruise Control 3.1.0: Cruise Control is a tool to dynamically rebalance workloads and self-heal Kafka clusters. The project has been donated by LinkedIn to the Linux Foundation. This is the first release since the donation and it mostly focuses on updating dependencies, including Kafka to 4.3.1, to address CVEs.
   

• Kroxylicious 0.25: Kroxylicious is an open source pluggable framework for writing network proxies that understand the Apache Kafka protocol. It adds Kubernetes-based authentication for HashiCorp Vault support and improves Kubernetes load balancer service integration.

Blogs

• These are not the brokers you are connecting to