November 2015 Summaries

The latest release of Apache Kafka, version 0.9, brings several significant features and improvements to enhance security, scalability, and reliability. The new version includes three key security features: Kerberos authentication, Unix-like permissions system, and encryption on the wire via SSL. Additionally, Kafka 0.9 introduces a new feature called Kafka Connect, which facilitates large-scale, real-time data import and export for Kafka. This feature abstracts away common problems that each such data integration tool needs to solve to be viable for 24×7 production environments. The release also includes support for user-defined quotas on producer and consumer APIs, ensuring that clients do not monopolize broker resources or cause network saturation. Furthermore, the new consumer API offers pluggable partition assignment and offset management, providing users with complete control over consumption semantics while still having the option of relying on convenient fault-tolerant group management semantics.

The Apache Kafka community recently concluded its busiest month ever, with a record number of bugs closed and last-minute improvements added to new features. The upcoming release of Kafka 0.9.0.0 is being prepared, and the community is proud to announce the release of Kafka 3.8.0, which includes many new features and improvements. A recent project was built using the confluent-kafka-javascript client to produce and consume data from a Kafka topic, settling the debate on tabs or spaces in a Kafka-style manner.