Kafka is a highly popular realtime data streaming platform, renowned for handling massive volumes of data with minimal latency. Typical use cases include handling user activity tracking, log aggregation and IoT telemetry. Kafka’s architecture, based on distributed partitions, allows it to scale horizontally across multiple brokers. But although Kafka excels at high data throughput, scaling it to manage thousands of client connections can be costly and complex.

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 3.9.0. This is a major release, the final one in the 3.x line. This will also be the final major release to feature the deprecated Apache ZooKeeper mode. Starting in 4.0 and later, Kafka will always run without ZooKeeper.