2024 - A Rewind

Dear Data Streaming Community,

As we bring down the curtain on this fortnightly newsletter for the year 2024, we feel proud to share the tremendous progress made within the Data Streaming technology area. We have witnessed exponential leaps and bounds in terms of large engineering teams across the globe adopting streaming technologies, especially Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®!

In this edition of the newsletter, let’s look back at major releases and events that took place throughout 2024!

Also, we sign off with 24 newsletters published in 2024! You can relax and grab an old edition at our usual Confluent Developer Newsletter section!We can’t wait to publish another year full of newsletters chronicling the journey and evolution of data streaming technologies in 2025!

Stay safe, and wishing you a very happy and prosperous 2025 ahead!

Apache Kafka and Apache Flink Highlights from 2024:

• The Kafka community brought us three releases in 2024: 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9! These releases were loaded with crucial features and updates, including a preview of the next generation of the consumer rebalancing protocol, a process to create a Docker native image for Apache Kafka based on GraalVM, and Dynamic KRaft Quorums
• Kafka 4.0 will fully say goodbye to ZooKeeper. There will be no support for running in ZK mode, or migrating from ZK mode. Kafka 3.9 serves as the “bridge” to 4.0!
• The Apache Flink community brought us Flink 1.19, Flink 1.20 and a preview release of Flink 2.0! Significant new features included custom parallelism for Table/SQL Sources, supporting SESSION window TVFs in streaming mode, the introduction of materialized tables, the introduction of the DISTRIBUTED BY clause, and a preview of disaggregated state storage and management.

Event Highlights from 2024:

• Kafka Summit London was held on March 19-20, 2024. It was a great success with 65+ breakout sessions and 20+ lightning talks attended by thousands of data streaming enthusiasts.
• The first ever Kafka Summit in Bangalore followed right on the heels of Kafka Summit London on May 2 and drew in 2500+ in-person and virtual attendees!
• Current 2024, a much bigger version of Kafka Summit was held in Austin,TX on September 17-18, with nearly 100 sessions attended by thousands of in-person and virtual attendees.

2025: Looking Ahead and Beyond!

• We are within striking distance of the Apache Kafka 4.0 release! Release 4.0 will remove ZooKeeper fully from Apache Kafka.
• The Apache Flink 2.0 release is also around the corner with crucial features and updates!
• Current 2025 is coming to Bengaluru, London and New Orleans! Stay tuned to participate in three of the biggest data streaming events of 2025!

Current Bengaluru 2025: The Road Ahead

Kafka Summit in Bengaluru, in 2024, was massive, and in 2025 something even bigger is happening as Current Bengaluru 2025. It’s the biggest data streaming event, in the world with a full day of keynotes, breakout sessions, and an amazing expo hall. It’s the can’t-miss event for the best minds in the data streaming world!

🏆 Build with Confluent Cloud & Win!

Develop a data streaming or Gen AI app with Confluent Cloud and stand a chance to win a gaming laptop (up to five winners)! Submit your project by Dec 31, 2024.
Start Building Today! {{my.game}} 

Upcoming Events:

In-Person Meetups:

• January 14th - Zurich
  • Speaker: Viktor Gamov
• January 16th - Milan @ Bitrock
  • Speaker: Viktor Gamov
• January 16th - Singapore
  • Speaker: Shelvia Hotama
• January 23rd - London @ Confluent London HQ
  • Speaker: Adi Polak
• January 23rd - Deinze, Belgium
  • Speaker: Gilles Philippart
• January 23rd - Jakarta
  • Speaker: Gandhi Manalu

Stay up to date with all Confluent-run meetup events - by copying the following link into your personal calendar platform:

https://airtable.com/app8KVpxxlmhTbfcL/shrNiipDJkCa2GBW7/iCal?timeZone=America%2FChicago&userLocale=en

(Instructions for GCal, iCal, Outlook, etc.) 

By the way…

We hope you enjoyed our curated assortment of resources! If you’d like to provide feedback, suggest ideas for content you’d like to see, or you want to submit your own resource for consideration, email us at devx_newsletter@confluent.io!

If you’d like to view previous editions of the newsletter, visit our archive.

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P.S. If you want to learn more about Kafka, Flink, or Confluent Cloud, visit our developer site at Confluent Developer.