Apache Kafka Release History

4.2.0 ? expected H2 2026 Forecast

Drawn from active KIPs and public community discussion. Not a commitment - scope can shift, slip, or be cut between now and the actual release.

KIP-1150 Diskless Kafka (preview) - brokers using object storage (S3/GCS/ADLS) as primary storage
Share groups post-GA hardening: better metrics, stronger delivery semantics
New consumer group protocol (KIP-848) becomes the default for new groups
Transactional protocol V2 stabilisation; tighter exactly-once guarantees
Tiered storage: broader filesystem plugin support, faster catch-up
KRaft observability and dynamic quorum reconfiguration improvements
Streams: incremental upgrades to the foreign-key join engine
Connect: improved exactly-once for sink connectors

4.1.0 2026-04 Latest

Share groups GA (KIP-932) - queue semantics over Kafka topics, multiple consumers can read from the same partition concurrently
KRaft hardening: faster failover, larger metadata caps
Streams: improved foreign-key joins, simplified topology builder
Stronger transactional guarantees for two-phase commits

4.0.0 2025-03 Major

ZooKeeper removed - KRaft is the only supported metadata mode
Share groups (preview) for queue-like consumption
New consumer group protocol (KIP-848) GA - server-side rebalancing
Brokers, Connect, Streams and admin tools require Java 17; clients (producer/consumer) keep Java 11 as the minimum
Scala 2.12 support dropped - Scala 2.13 only

3.9.0 2024-11

ZK-to-KRaft migration tools finalised; rolling migrations supported
Dynamic KRaft quorum reconfiguration
Connect: pluggable config providers for secret management

3.8.0 2024-07

Tiered storage hardening; production-quality plugin SPI
JBOD support with KRaft
Consumer group protocol (KIP-848) preview improvements

3.7.0 2024-02

Tiered storage (Early Access) - offload old segments to S3/HDFS/GCS
Next-gen consumer group protocol (KIP-848) preview
Client telemetry collection (KIP-714)

3.6.0 2023-10

Tiered storage preview (server side)
ZK-to-KRaft migration enters production-ready phase
Connect: cooperative rebalance default

3.5.0 2023-06

Producer cooperative rebalance (KIP-848 foundations)
Connect: exactly-once source connectors maturity
Streams: emit-on-change in suppress operator

3.4.0 2023-02

KRaft GA for new clusters
Transactional state stores in Kafka Streams
Server-side fetch from closest replica

3.3.0 2022-10

KRaft mode marked production-ready (KIP-833)
KIP-405 design for tiered storage finalised
Streams: emit-final for suppress, exactly-once V2

3.2.0 2022-05

Log4j 2 migration (KIP-653)
Interactive Queries v2 in Kafka Streams (KIP-806)
Configurable client telemetry and tracing hooks

3.1.0 2022-01

Connect: per-source-record headers
Streams: KStream-KStream join improvements
KRaft snapshot system improvements

3.0.0 2021-09 Major

Java 8 deprecated; clients and broker move toward Java 11
Producer: stronger delivery guarantees on by default
KRaft mode (KIP-500) enters early access for new clusters
Removal of long-deprecated APIs

2.8.0 2021-04

KRaft preview (KIP-500) - run Kafka without ZooKeeper
Sliding window aggregations in Streams

2.7.0 2020-12

Core controller refactor preparing for KRaft
End-to-end latency metrics in Streams
Configurable TCP listener bind ordering

2.6.0 2020-08

SASL/OAUTHBEARER with token refresh
Client-side throttling visibility
Smooth scaling of Kafka Streams with cooperative rebalancing

2.5.0 2020-04

Co-grouping in Kafka Streams
Improved broker observability metrics
Incremental rebalance protocol for the consumer (KIP-429)

2.4.0 2019-12

Foreign-key joins for KTables in Streams
Sticky partitioner for the producer
Allow consumers to fetch from the closest replica (KIP-392)

2.3.0 2019-06

Connect REST API improvements; incremental cooperative rebalance
Static membership (KIP-345) - reduce rebalances on restart
Incremental fetch (KIP-392) groundwork

2.2.0 2019-03

Default partition count for auto-create
Simplified consumer group reset tooling
Allow incremental fetch session limits

2.1.0 2018-11

ZStandard compression support
Java 11 support for clients
OffsetsForTimes API improvements

2.0.0 2018-07 Major

Prefixed ACLs and resource-pattern-type filtering
Dynamic broker configurations
OAuth via SASL/OAUTHBEARER (preview)
Drop of Java 7 support

1.1.0 2018-03

JBOD support with failure-tolerant disk handling
Controller failover improvements
Connect: more flexible REST API

1.0.0 2017-11 Major

GA milestone for the entire Kafka stack (brokers + clients + Streams + Connect)
JBOD-friendly disk failure semantics
Quotas on bytes per second per client

0.11.0 2017-06

Exactly-once semantics (KIP-98) - transactional producer, read-committed consumer
Idempotent producer
Message format v2 with headers and improved compaction
Streams: exactly-once processing guarantees

0.10.0 2016-05

Kafka Streams API - library for stream processing inside applications
Message timestamps in the record header
Rack-aware replica assignment
SASL/SCRAM authentication

0.9.0 2015-11

Security: SASL/Kerberos, SSL/TLS, authorisation via ACLs
New consumer API (Java)
Kafka Connect - framework for source/sink connectors
Quotas for client request rates

0.8.0 2013-12

Intra-cluster replication - the breakthrough that made Kafka production-grade
High-level consumer with ZooKeeper-managed offsets
Log compaction (preview)

0.7.0 2012-01 First

First release under the Apache Software Foundation after donation from LinkedIn
Append-only commit log with topic/partition model
High-throughput pull-based consumer