Kafka Apache Messaging server Release Version Major Minor Patch End-of-life EOL Support End-of-support EOS Maintenance End-of-maintenance EOM Security Long-term support LTS Vulnerabilities Common vulnerabilities & exposures CVE Security product-release-end-of-life-overview.xml free-trial.xml 📅 Last update on 2025-08-08 What is Kafka?   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. Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Kafka (Apache)   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. Product Kafka Vendor Apache Latest version 4.0.0 Number of releases 27 Number of versions 261 Number of unstable versions 184 Number of versions affected by CVE 60 Licence Apache License 2.0 Licence details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Version_2.0 Product site Release info Version command Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka