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Testing is one of the hardest parts of building reliable distributed systems. Kafka has long had a set of system tests that cover distributed operation but this is an area that is simply never good enough.
At Confluent and Cloudera we’ve both been working on improving the testing capabilities for Kafka.
An area of particular importance is compatibility. Companies that want to build reliable data real-time data flow and processing around Kafka need to be able to do so without fear of incompatibilities that could arise release to release or between versions of Kafka from different vendors.
We’re announcing today a project with the folks at Cloudera and the rest of the open source community to develop high quality tests to certify API and protocol compatibility between versions and distributions.
We’ll be doing this as part of the normal Apache development process, much as we do any other Kafka development.
We think ensuring this kind of compatibility is one of the key aspects of building a healthy ecosystem of systems, applications, and processing frameworks, that is the core of our stream data platform goal.
We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 3.9.0. This is a major release, the final one in the 3.x line. This will also be the final major release to feature the deprecated Apache ZooKeeper® mode. Starting in 4.0 and later, Kafka will always run without ZooKeeper.
In this third installment of a blog series examining Kafka Producer and Consumer Internals, we switch our attention to Kafka consumer clients, examining how consumers interact with brokers, coordinate their partitions, and send requests to read data from Kafka topics.