Apache Kafka® 2.5 is here, and we’ve got some Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) to discuss! Tim Berglund shares improvements and changes to over 10 KIPs all within the realm of Core Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Kafka Streams, including foundational improvements to exactly-once semantics, the ability to track a connector’s active topics, and adding a new co-group operator to the Streams DSL.

Jakub Korab discusses what professional services actually is and how it relates to customer success. It all centers around what customers want to do, and you’ll hear about trends, Kafka use cases, and real-life examples of professional services in action within various industries over the last year.

Apache Kafka 2.4 includes new Kafka Core developments and improvements to Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, including MirrorMaker 2.0, RocksDB metrics, and more.

In today's spooktacular episode of Streaming Audio, Anna McDonald discusses six of the scariest Apache Kafka® JIRAs.

Gwen Shapira outlines KIP-402, which aims to improve fairness in how Apache Kafka® processes connections and how network threads pick up requests and new data. She also shares about her team’s efforts to make user-facing Kafka improvements.