This 102nd edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in July 2026.
For last month’s digest, see Kafka Monthly Digest: June 2026.
Releases
There is one release in progress:
4.4.0
KIP freeze happened on July 8. Feature freeze as well as the release branch cut are expected in early August. You can find the release plan in the wiki.
Kafka Improvement Proposals
Last month, the community submitted 9 KIPs (KIP-1361 to KIP-1369). I'll highlight a few of them:
KIP-1365: Transform Observability and Skipped Record Handling for Kafka Connect: This KIP aims at improving the observability of records skipped due to errors and filters in Connect transformations. It proposes new metrics as well as a new callback for sink tasks to track skipped records.
KIP-1366: Configurable Segment Interval for Window and Session Stores: Window and session stores rely on time-based segments, with the duration computed fixed on half of the retention period. For this reason any changes in the retention period causes segment limits to change and forces a full state restore. Also for any retention longer than a few hours, this can lead to large segments. This KIP proposes making the segment duration configurable for window and session stores.
KIP-1368: Client framework name and version: Since Kafka 2.4, clients report their names and versions when connecting to brokers (KIP-511). In practice Kafka clients are often embedded in larger frameworks or even components like Streams and Connect. This KIP proposes adding new configurations so clients can report the framework they are a part of.
Community Releases
I selected releases of some open source community projects:
kroxylicious 0.23.0: Kroxylicious is an open source pluggable framework for writing network proxies that understand the Apache Kafka protocol. This new release introduces a dynamic routing API. This feature, still in preview, enables dispatching requests to multiple Kafka clusters.
Sarama 1.60: Sarama is a pure Golang Kafka client. This adds support for the latest Kafka releases (4.1.2, 4.2.1 and 4.3.1), as well as APIs to the Admin client to describe and list transactions (KIP-664).
Debezium 3.6: Debezium is a Change Data Capture platform. This release contains dozens of new features and all connectors have received significant improvements.
librdkafka 2.15: Librdkafka is a Kafka client in C/C++. This release adds support for share groups (queues) in preview access.
Blogs
I selected some interesting blog articles that were published last month:
- Putting a Kafka Topic Naming Convention into Practice with Terraform
- Dead Letter Queue in Kafka Streams (KIP-1034)
- Apache Kafka performance #1 - linger.ms
- Scaling StreamHub: Transitioning from Kinesis to Kafka for 145 Billion Daily Events
To learn more about Kafka, visit Red Hat Developer's Apache Kafka topic page.
