Kafka

What is Kafka?

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.

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.

Facts and figures about Kafka

 

 

Keywords

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