The Apache Software Foundation has released Apache Kafka 3.3.1 with many new features and improvements. In particular, this is the first release that marks KRaft (Kafka Raft) consensus protocol as production ready. In development for several years, it was released in early access in Kafka 2.8, then in preview in Kafka 3.0.
KRaft is the consensus protocol developed to allow metadata management directly in Apache Kafka. This greatly simplifies Kafka’s architecture by consolidating responsibility for metadata into Kafka itself without the requirement of a third-party tool like Apache ZooKeeper. This new KRaft mode improves partition scalability and resiliency while simplifying deployments of Apache Kafka that now can be deployed standalone.
