Aiven supports Apache Kafka® 3.2

What’s new in Apache Kafka 3.2

The release of Apache Kafka 3.2 brings numerous improvements and bug fixes (you can read about them all in the release notes).

At Aiven, we're especially pleased to see how version 3.2 brings us a step closer to switching to self-managed metadata quorum based on KRaft.

Here are some of our top highlights in version 3.2:

Standard Authorizer

KIP-801: Implement an Authorizer that stores metadata in _cluster_metadata

The Standard Authorizer is a built-in Authorizer for KRaft mode that does not depend on ZooKeeper. It's an important step in further removing ZooKeeper dependencies from Apache Kafka.

At Aiven we use our own fully open-source authoriser which is already KRaft-ready.

New leader recovery state

KIP-704: Send a hint to the partition leader to recover the partition

Allows the controller to indicate to the newly elected topic partition leader whether it was selected using an “unclean leader election”. This process could be used, for example, in cases when transaction status is inconsistent. It helps in coordinating cluster recovery.

List all connectors

KIP-769: Connect APIs to list all connector plugins and retrieve their configuration definitions

Connect APIs are now able to list all connector plugins. This allows users to list all available connectors without needing to know the Connect runtime set-up. There’s also an additional endpoint that returns the configs of a specific connector plugin.

How to get started with Aiven for Apache Kafka 3.2

You can either launch a brand new cluster in Aiven console or conduct a no-downtime upgrade to the latest version.

To find out more about upgrade paths and get answers to any questions, check out the release notes for the project itself.

Wrapping up

To find out more about Apache Kafka, take a look at our post What is Apache Kafka.

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