Apache Kafka 3.6.0 has been released, bringing several new features and improvements, including Tiered Storage, which provides a separation of computation and storage in the broker for pluggable storage tiering. This feature is currently an early access release suitable only for testing in non-production environments. Additionally, this release introduces improved durability for the KRaft layer by adding metadata transactions that consist of BeginTransaction, Number of records, EndTransaction or AbortTransaction. The release also includes support for Delegation Tokens in KRaft, further reducing the gap between ZooKeeper-based Kafka clusters and KRaft. Furthermore, this release upgrades the ZooKeeper version bundled with Kafka to 3.8.2, improves data integrity by adding more validation logic for message timestamps, and introduces new metrics for KRaft performance. Other notable improvements include support for topic-mutating SMTs for async sink connectors, first-class admin support for offsets in Kafka Connect, and enhanced plugin class discovery for Connect workers.