Download

2.1.0 is the latest release. The current stable version is 2.1.0.

You can verify your download by following these procedures and using these KEYS.

2.1.0

Kafka 2.1.0 includes a number of significant new features. Here is a summary of some notable changes:

  • Java 11 support
  • Support for Zstandard, which achieves compression comparable to gzip with higher compression and especially decompression speeds (KIP-110)
  • Avoid expiring committed offsets for active consumer group (KIP-211)
  • Provide Intuitive User Timeouts in The Producer (KIP-91)
  • Kafka's replication protocol now supports improved fencing of zombies. Previously, under certain rare conditions, if a broker became partitioned from Zookeeper but not the rest of the cluster, then the logs of replicated partitions could diverge and cause data loss in the worst case (KIP-320).
  • Streams API improvements (KIP-319, KIP-321, KIP-330, KIP-353, KIP-356)
  • Admin script and admin client API improvements to simplify admin operation (KIP-231, KIP-308, KIP-322, KIP-324, KIP-338, KIP-340)
  • DNS handling improvements (KIP-235, KIP-302)

For more information, please read the detailed Release Notes.

2.0.1

2.0.0

Kafka 2.0.0 includes a number of significant new features. Here is a summary of some notable changes:

  • KIP-290 adds support for prefixed ACLs, simplifying access control management in large secure deployments. Bulk access to topics, consumer groups or transactional ids with a prefix can now be granted using a single rule. Access control for topic creation has also been improved to enable access to be granted to create specific topics or topics with a prefix.
  • KIP-255 adds a framework for authenticating to Kafka brokers using OAuth2 bearer tokens. The SASL/OAUTHBEARER implementation is customizable using callbacks for token retrieval and validation.
  • Host name verification is now enabled by default for SSL connections to ensure that the default SSL configuration is not susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. You can disable this verification if required.
  • > ocation.pathname = currentPath + 'streams'; fiedFullPath) { 190124_include/documentation/streams') && !currentPath.inclu in ZooKeeper before starting brokers, including SSL keystore and truststore passwords and JAAS configuration for SASL. With this new feature, you can store sensitive password configs in encrypted form in ZooKeeper rather than in cleartext in the broker properties file.
  • The replication protocol has been improved to avoid log divergence between leader and follower during fast leader failover. We have also improved resilience of brokers by reducing the memory footprint of message down-conversions. By using message chunking, both memory usage and memory reference time have been reduced to avoid OutOfMemory errors in brokers.
  • Kafka clients are now notified of throttling before any throttling is applied when quotas are enabled. This enables clients to distinguish between network errors and large throttle times when quotas are exceeded.
  • We have added a configuration option for Kafka consumer to avoid indefinite blocking in the consumer.
  • We have dropped support for Java 7 and removed the previously deprecated Scala producer and consumer.
  • Kafka Connect includes a number of improvements and features. KIP-298 enables you to control how errors in connectors, transformations and converters are handled by enabling automatic retries and controlling the number of errors that are tolerated before the connector is stopped. More contextual information can be included in the logs to help diagnose problems and problematic messages consumed by sink connectors can be sent to a dead letter queue rather than forcing the connector to stop.
  • KIP-297 adds a new extension point to move secrets out of connector configurations and integrate with any external key management system. The placeholders in connector configurations are only resolved before sending the configuration to the connector, ensuring that secrets are stored and managed securely in your preferred key management system and not exposed over the REST APIs or in log files.
  • We have added a thin Scala wrapper API for our Kafka Streams DSL, which provides better type inference and better type safety during compile time. Scala users can have less boilerplate in their code, notably regarding Serdes with new implicit Serdes.
  • Message headers are now supported in the Kafka Streams Processor API, allowing users to add and manipulate headers read from the source topics and propagate them to the sink topics.
  • Windowed aggregations performance in Kafka Streams has been largely improved (sometimes by an order of magnitude) thanks to the new single-key-fetch API.
  • We have further improved unit testibility of Kafka Streams with the kafka-streams-testutil artifact.

For more information, please read the detailed Release Notes.

1.1.1

1.1.0

Kafka 1.1.0 includes a number of significant new features. Here is a summary of some notable changes:

  • Kafka 1.1.0 includes significant improvements to the Kafka Controller that speed up controlled shutdown. ZooKeeper session expiration edge cases have also been fixed as part of this effort.
  • Controller improvements also enable more partitions to be supported on a single cluster. KIP-227 introduced incremental fetch requests, providing more efficient replication when the number of partitions is large.
  • KIP-113 added support for replica movement between log directories to enable data balancing with JBOD.
  • Some of the broker configuration options like SSL keystores can now be updated dynamically without restarting the broker. See KIP-226 for details and the full list of dynamic configs.
  • Delegation token based authentication (KIP-48) has been added to Kafka brokers to support large number of clients without overloading Kerberos KDCs or other authentication servers.
  • Several new features have been added to Kafka Connect, including header support (KIP-145), SSL and Kafka cluster identifiers in the Connect REST interface (KIP-208 and KIP-238), validation of connector names (KIP-212) and support for topic regex in sink connectors (KIP-215). Additionally, the default maximum heap size for Connect workers was increased to 2GB.
  • Several improvements have been added to the Kafka Streams API, including reducing repartition topic partitions footprint, customizable error handling for produce failures and enhanced resilience to broker unavailability. See KIPs 205, 210, 220, 224 and 239 for details.

For more information, please read the detailed Release Notes.

1.0.2

1.0.1

1.0.0

Kafka 1.0.0 is no mere bump of the version number. The Apache Kafka Project Management Committee has packed a number of valuable enhancements into the release. Here is a summary of a few of them:

  • Since its introduction in version 0.10, the Streams API has become hugely popular among Kafka users, including the likes of Pinterest, Rabobank, Zalando, and The New York Times. In 1.0, the the API continues to evolve at a healthy pace. To begin with, the builder API has been improved (KIP-120). A new API has been added to expose the state of active tasks at runtime (KIP-130). The new cogroup API makes it much easier to deal with partitioned aggregates with fewer StateStores and fewer moving parts in your code (KIP-150). Debuggability gets easier with enhancements to the print() and writeAsText() methods (KIP-160). And if that’s not enough, check out KIP-138 and KIP-161 too. For more on streams, check out the Apache Kafka Streams documentation, including some helpful new tutorial videos.
  • Operating Kafka at scale requires that the system remain observable, and to make that easier, we’ve made a number of improvements to metrics. These are too many to summarize without becoming tedious, but Connect metrics have been significantly improved (KIP-196), a litany of new health check metrics are now exposed (KIP-188), and we now have a global topic and partition count (KIP-168). Check out KIP-164 and KIP-187 for even more.
  • We now support Java 9, leading, among other things, to significantly faster TLS and CRC32C implementations. Over-the-wire encryption will be faster now, which will keep Kafka fast and compute costs low when encryption is enabled.
  • In keeping with the security theme, KIP-152 cleans up the error handling on Simple Authentication Security Layer (SASL) authentication attempts. Previously, some authentication error conditions were indistinguishable from broker failures and were not logged in a clear way. This is cleaner now.
  • Kafka can now tolerate disk failures better. Historically, JBOD storage configurations have not been recommended, but the architecture has nevertheless been tempting: after all, why not rely on Kafka’s own replication mechanism to protect against storage failure rather than using RAID? With KIP-112, Kafka now handles disk failure more gracefully. A single disk failure in a JBOD broker will not bring the entire broker down; rather, the broker will continue serving any log files that remain on functioning disks.
  • Since release 0.11.0, the idempotent producer (which is the producer used in the presence of a transaction, which of course is the producer we use for exactly-once processing) required max.in.flight.requests.per.connection to be equal to one. As anyone who has written or tested a wire protocol can attest, this put an upper bound on throughput. Thanks to KAFKA-5949, this can now be as large as five, relaxing the throughput constraint quite a bit.

For more information, please read the detailed Release Notes.

0.11.0.3

0.11.0.2

0.11.0.1

0.11.0.0

0.10.2.2

0.10.2.1

0.10.2.0

0.10.1.1

0.10.1.0

0.10.0.1

0.10.0.0

0.9.0.1

0.9.0.0

0.8.2.2

0.8.2.1

0.8.2.0

0.8.2-beta

0.8.1.1 Release

0.8.1 Release

0.8.0 Release

0.8.0 Beta1 Release

0.7.2 Release

0.7.1 Release

0.7.0 Release

You can download releases previous to 0.7.0-incubating here.