Introducing Apache Kafka® 4.0

Apache Kafka 4.0 makes life easier for developers and operators running Kafka-based applications and pipelines at scale. Kafka 4.0's completed transition to KRaft eliminates ZooKeeper (KIP-500), making clusters easier to operate at any scale. With KIP-848, consumer group rebalances are faster and simpler, leading to more reliable and scalable applications, with a lighter-weight client library. The community continues to use and enjoy Kafka Streams to build microservices and stream processing applications: KIP-1112 gives users a single, easy way to inject cross-cutting logic to all Kafka Streams apps across both the Processor API and DSL; KIP-1076 and KIP-1091 improve observability with consolidated client metrics available on the broker, and new detailed state metrics.

Apache Kafka 4.0 also includes an Early Access release of Queues for Kafka (KIP-932), which focuses on testing a new consumer group named a Share Group. If you’re interested in EA testing this KIP, please see the Early Access Release Notes.

Apache Kafka 4.0 includes over 35 new KIPs. It is the culmination of 3.5+ years of work and includes over 1,500 commits, all made possible by 175 contributors. Read about all the KIPs, including highlights like KIP-890, KIP-966, KIP-996, KIP-1102, KIP-1104, and so much more in the release blog.

Current Bengaluru 2025

Current Bengaluru 2025, which happened in March, saw a massive gathering of 2500+ data streaming enthusiasts, who got together and networked over one full day of 35+ breakout sessions plus a keynote, which featured major announcements from Confluent!

While the event was the biggest data streaming event of 2025 for India, its next stop is Current London 2025, happening at ExCeL London, Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL, on May 20-21!

Here’s a quick recap of some of the major announcements from Current Bengaluru 2025:

• Tableflow became Generally Available( GA) with Apache Iceberg™️ and went Early Access with Delta Lake!
• Apache Flink® Native Inference which seamlessly runs AI models, launched with Early Access
• Fully managed Oracle XStream CDC Premium Connector was announced, with General Availability coming soon!

Read about all of the Q1 2025 launches for Confluent Cloud here.

Data Streaming Resources:

• Apache Flink® 2.0.0 has been released! This is the first release in the Flink 2.x series and is the first major release since Flink 1.0 launched nine years ago. In this release, 165 contributors came together to complete 25 FLIPs (Flink Improvement Proposals) and 369 issues. Highlights of the new features include Disaggregated State Management, Stream-Batch Unification with Materialized Tables, Streaming Lakehouse, etc. Read the official release post.
• Watch the latest episode of Life Is But A Stream. In this episode, Chris Kapp, Software Architect at Henry Schein One (HS1), shares how his team modernizes data management to stay competitive and unlock real-time insights.

Learn about:

• How tagging strategies, immutable audit logs, and governance keep data secure and reliable

• The challenges (and wins) of getting leadership buy-in for data modernization

• HS1’s approach to decentralized data ownership, domain-driven design, and the importance of stream processing for scaling

• The role of GenAI in the future of real-time stream processing

• Dive deep into the Kafka Replication Protocol and learn how it separates control plane and data plane responsibilities, in this in-depth blog written by Jack Vanlightly of Confluent.

• Check out the most viewed documents on Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform:

  • Apache Flink - A Complete Introduction
  • Introduction to Kafka Connect
  • Apache Kafka®: Basic Concepts, Architecture, and Examples

Links From Around the Web:

• Read an interesting take on “data governance federation” for a data lakehouse, written by Christian Thiel.
• With MCP(Model Context Protocol) making a lot of headlines in the Generative AI space, learn about hyper-mcp, a powerful MCP server that leverages WebAssembly plugins to extend its capabilities.
• DuckDB has supported reading Iceberg tables since September 2023 via an Iceberg extension. Recently DuckDB introduced a new preview feature in this extension, which allows attaching to Iceberg REST catalogs. This new preview feature enables DuckDB users to connect to Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse with ease. Read the announcement blog.

Upcoming Events:

In-Person Meetups:

• April 3rd - Melbourne
• April 7th - Vienna
• April 8th - Minneapolis
• April 11th - Singapore
• April 14th - Paris
• April 15th - Tel Aviv
• April 15th - Tokyo
• April 16th - Jakarta
• April 19th - Bangalore
• April 19th - Chennai
• April 24th - Warsaw
• April 24th - Belgium
• April 26th - Kolkata

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

(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!

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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.