On Tuesday, 7th February 2023, the launch of Apache Kafka 3.4.0 was announced, which brought several new features to the table. The main focus of this release lies in the ability to monitor and adjust clustering settings, and CloudKarafka took some days to look into the details.
Migrate Kafka clusters from Zookeeper to KRaft
An essential feature in this release is the ability to migrate Kafka clusters from Zookeeper to KRaft without any system downtime. This feature is made basically by allowing a rollback to Zookeeper through the migration. The metadata is written in two copies, both to Zookeeper and KRaft. However, this is available as an early access feature and should only be tried in non-production environments.
Other releases:
Disabling JmxReporter registration
The community has requested the ability to turn off their JMXreporter for some time. Previous versions came with the JMX reporter built in and were not optional - needed or not. This change is beneficial as it provides more control over which metrics-reporter runs and what metrics are unnecessary.
Broadcasting a result record allowed
Users often want to send a message to more than one partition on the sink topic, which has been a hassle in previous versions. This new feature aims to make this process simpler in Kafka Streams.
Add "generation" field into consumer protocol
Metadata following consumers has expanded to include the highest stable generation they were part of. A partition assignor can now use this information to determine whether claims of ownership by a consumer are valid and which consumer has the most recent claim to an unclaimed partition.
Time-based cluster metadata snapshots
Kafka uses snapshots to compact the size of the log and eliminate duplicate messages. Snapshots are based on appended bytes since the last snapshot. In addition to compaction, snapshots can also be used as backups for the cluster metadata. With this feature, you can now generate snapshots based on time to better support this case.
More from Apache:
This release has implemented many improvements such as bug fixes, tasks, and tests. The Apache Kafka software is developing steadily, and CloudKarafka and the Apache Kafka community welcomes these updates.
Release notes can be found here
https://archive.apache.org/dist/kafka/3.4.0/RELEASE_NOTES.html
Apache Kafka 3.4.0 is avaliable for CloudKarafka
You can easily upgrade your Apache Kafka cluster to version 3.4.0. All you need to do is visit the CloudKarafka interface and click on Upgrade Kafka.
CloudKarafka offers support 24/7
If you have any queries or problems, our support team are on hand 24/7 to help you. Just send an email to support@cloudkarafka.com.
All the best!
