Aiven Kafka 1.0 Is Now Ready

After seven years of development, Apache Kafka released version 1.0.0 this past November.

Neha Narkhede, CTO of Confluent, stated that it represents a "Completeness of our vision."

That's a pretty big statement and is representative of 1.0.0 not merely being a version change, but something bigger. Let's look at Aiven's take on some of the highlights of the version release.

Enhanced metrics support

You can get more information about the health of your Kafka service because of the increased granularity of the available data.

This will help Kafka gain more traction in enterprise deployments as there's better visibility into its inner workings. Aiven Kafka will be making these metrics available to you in the upcoming weeks.

Support for Java 9

Brings much improved performance in communication over TLS: numbers of up to 250% improved performance have been reported. Aiven will provide support for this later on in 2018.

Notable bug fixes 

1. Speed increase of broker startup after unclean shutdown

By reducing unnecessary snapshot file deletions, restarts after an unclean shutdown are up to an order of magnitude faster than before.

This improves recovery times in situations where things have already gone wrong.

2. Improved memory usage during partition reassignment

In 0.11, memory usage would spike during partition reassignment. Now, there is more efficient memory usage for partition reassignments during rebalances within Aiven Kafka.

Why both are important: improved resource management equals improved stability and performance. 

Aiven ensures that Apache Kafka 1.0 is ready for production use

As excited as we are for new releases, they are rarely ready for production use out of the box and Kafka 1.0 was no different.

Most notably, there was an issue surrounding memory leakage that needed to be resolved.

After much work from the community, we have now made Apache Kafka 1.0 available on the Aiven platform.

Get Aiven Kafka 1.0 today

All newly created Aiven Kafka services will be running on 1.0 automatically and we will be upgrading current client Kafka services in January.

If you are a current client and wish to upgrade to Kafka 1.0 earlier, feel free to do so by clicking the maintenance upgrade button within your customer panel.