Lifecycle guide for Kafka from Apache

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

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📅 Last update on 2026-01-21

What is Kafka?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

Apache Kafka is a framework implementation of a software bus using stream-processing. It is an open-source software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Kafka can connect to external systems (for data import/export) via Kafka Connect and provides Kafka Streams, a Java stream processing library. Kafka uses a binary TCP-based protocol that is optimized for efficiency and relies on a "message set" abstraction that naturally groups messages together to reduce the overhead of the network roundtrip.

The entire lifecycle of Kafka

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of Kafka. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

Kafka (Apache) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Kafka (Apache)

What is the Kafka release strategy?

Given 3 releases a year and the fact that no one upgrades three times a year, we propose making sure (by testing!) that rolling upgrade can be done from each release in the past year (i.e. last 3 releases) to the latest version. We will also attempt, as a community to do bugfix releases as needed for the last 3 releases.