Apache Kafka® 2.5 now available on Aiven

Aiven now supports Apache Kafka version 2.5, allowing you to launch a managed Kafka service on any of our supported clouds and their regions, including AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure. Aiven is among the first cloud services to provide Apache Kafka 2.5 as a fully managed service.

Enhancements and improvements

This release takes further steps to deprecate ZooKeeper and improve support for Kafka’s administrative API which will replace ZooKeeper access in admin tools. There are also features to support exactly once semantics (EOS), which provide transactional message-processing guarantees. Let’s look at some of these improvements in more detail:

Removal of dependencies on Apache ZooKeeper

• KIP-500 replaces ZooKeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum, and implements the following fixes in Apache Kafka 2.5:
  • KIP-555 - deprecates direct ZooKeeper access in Kafka administrative tools
  • KIP-543 - expands ConfigCommand’s non-ZooKeeper functionality, so that instead of relying on direct ZooKeeper access, it can now issue administrative calls instead via a broker using KafkaAdminClient.

Improvements to exactly once semantics

• KIP-447 - implements and improves producer scalability for exactly once semantics (EOS).

• KIP-360 - improves reliability of producer by addressing a problem with producer state retention.

There are also a number of metrics and operational enhancements along with improvements to Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams. For the complete picture, see this post.

How to get Aiven for Apache Kafka 2.5

When creating your Kafka service from Aiven console, simply select ‘2.5’ in the drop-down menu from the Kafka service box. You can also create a Kafka 2.5 service by using the appropriate switch from the Aiven REST API, the command line interface, or your Terraform tooling.

Wrapping up

With Kafka 2.5, you’ll get enhancements for scalability, metrics and security features, along with EOS improvements and much more. We’ll be continually adding the newest versions of all of our hosted services, so check out our blog and changelog RSS feeds, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn to follow the latest releases.