Apache Kafka 4.0: What’s New and Why This Upgrade is a Total Game-Changer

Apache Kafka 4.0 is here, and it’s packed with upgrades that touch almost every part of the platform!

From Kafka Streams to Kafka Connect, and from brokers to producers and consumers, this release is bigger than ever.

The recently introduced Apache Kafka 4.0 comes with a number of upgrades across nearly every aspect of the open source distributed event streaming platform.

With a slew of Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs) contributed by the open-source community, Kafka 4.0 isn’t just an update.

This article explains the biggest changes in a way that’s easy to understand.

1. Bye-Bye ZooKeeper, Hello KRaft!

🔴 What was the problem?

Older versions of Kafka needed ZooKeeper, an external system, to manage metadata (such as tracking which servers store which data). While ZooKeeper worked well, it made Kafka more complicated to set up and maintain.

🟢 What’s the solution?

Kafka 4.0 removes ZooKeeper and replaces it with KRaft (Kafka Raft), which is built directly into Kafka itself.