Apache Kafka 3.8 was released in June of this year, the previous version 3.7 became available in February, and the next version 3.9 is scheduled for release in the fall of 2024. The tool is needed to build event-driven applications and data pipelines. Version 3.8 has security improvements, JBOD support, and the ability to delete configurations.
​The main changes include:
- Added a mechanism for configuring the topic, producer, and broker to specify the desired compression level, and added 3 integer parameters for zstd, gzip, and lz4.
- Full JBOD support has been added to allow multiple catalogs to be maintained for each broker. This support is very important for large project deployments.
- When known brokers are unavailable, it is now possible to repeat the download process while updating metadata.
- The ability to share storage in Kafka Streams was added. This change will allow data to be utilized without the need for duplication. Also, new metrics have been added to Streams applications to search for performance issues and leaks.
- To avoid unrestricted access and improve security, it is now possible to restrict files. Moreover, it is now possible to customize timeout when reading from remote storage.
More than 200 developers and other contributors participated in creating the code for version 3.8.
