Confluent Platform 5.2 is now available, offering significant enhancements in three key dimensions: building contextual event-driven applications, managing larger and more complex Kafka deployments, and enabling hybrid event streaming leveraging Confluent Cloud. The platform introduces a new Developer License, allowing developers to run all commercial features for free on single-broker Kafka clusters without time constraints. This license provides unrestricted access to Control Center, KSQL, and other commercial features, making it easier for developers to experiment freely and solve problems. Additionally, the release includes major enhancements to Control Center, such as improved schema management, dynamic broker configuration changes, and support for multiple Kafka Connect and KSQL clusters. Confluent Platform 5.2 is built on Apache Kafka 2.2.0, which includes new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. The platform also enables hybrid event streaming with the ability to replicate Schema Registry to Confluent Cloud, making it easier to manage larger and more complex deployments. With these enhancements, developers can build contextual event-driven applications faster and more efficiently, while managing their Kafka environments at scale.