Confluent Platform 7.2 offers several enhancements to existing features, including improved management tasks for Apache Kafka operators, flexible options to build globally available hybrid architectures, and boosted developer productivity. The platform now supports source-initiated links in Confluent for Kubernetes, enabling the creation of cluster links that originate from the source cluster without requiring firewall access or storing security credentials in the cloud. Additionally, Confluent Platform 7.2 introduces flexible topic naming for Cluster Linking, simplifying the setup of common hybrid and multi-cloud use cases. The platform also includes several enhancements to ksqlDB, such as support for aggregate functions with complex data types and RIGHT JOINs for stream-stream and table-table-joins. Furthermore, Confluent Platform 7.2 is built on Apache Kafka version 3.2, which simplifies the security architecture by introducing a Kraft-based authorizer.