Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing in Apache Kafka: Why Stop the World When You Can Change It?

[Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing] in Apache Kafka clients improves scalability, reduces rebalancing costs, and increases overall throughput by allowing workers to run tasks without disruptions, resulting in a more efficient and flexible load balancing mechanism. This new approach enables large-scale deployment of clients, alleviates the impact of existing stop-the-world rebalancing protocols, and provides a significant improvement in terms of cost, scaling, and performance. The Incremental Cooperative Rebalancing protocol is implemented in Kafka Connect, allowing connectors to scale beyond current limits and enabling more centralized and manageable connector deployments.