Confluent has launched the next generation of its Control Center for Confluent Platform, enhancing the management of Apache Kafka with increased partition limits, faster startup times, and improved metrics freshness. Originally introduced in 2016, the Control Center now supports up to 400,000 partitions, significantly more than its previous limit, and reduces startup time to just one minute. The integration with Prometheus optimizes metrics handling, eliminating the need for a separate Kafka cluster for metrics storage, which streamlines operations and reduces costs. Fully backward compatible with versions 7.5 to 7.9, this release is part of Confluent's efforts to refine Kafka management with seamless scalability and user experience improvements. Looking ahead, the Confluent Platform 8.0, expected in 2025, will be based on Apache Kafka 4.0, with plans to phase out support for certain legacy clients. The company is also working on a UI for Apache Flink and enhancing management across cloud and on-premises environments.