• Feature Releases
  • Apache Kafka
  • Technical
General Availability of Apache Kafka® and Kafka Connect 2.5.1

Instaclustr is pleased to announce the release of Apache Kafka version 2.5.1 on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. The new version is also available paired with version 2.5.1 of Kafka Connect. Apache Kafka is the leading distributed event streaming platform and is open source under the Apache 2.0 License. Instaclustr provides our customers managed and supported open source software allowing them to avoid the risks of both vendor lock-in and unsupported software: open source that’s really open source.

Version 2.5.1 of Apache Kafka focuses on quality and stability with a large number of bug fixes. This focus on quality also extended to ZooKeeper which has been upgraded to version 3.5.8.

Here are the notable new features that have been incorporated into our managed service:

A series of new metrics have been added:

  • Kafka—Replica Fetcher Manager Metrics. This metric group contains metrics regarding the lag in number of messages per follower replica. Full details can be  found in the fetcher manager documentation;
  • Kafka Connect—Connector Metrics. This metric shows the tasks stats of each connector and has been enabled on the Monitoring API;
  • Kafka—Control Plane Metrics. This metric group contains the metrics detailing how the control plane  is handling requests and has been enabled on the Monitoring API;
  • Kafka—Group Coordinator. This metric shows the partition load times stats when a group coordinator starts up and has been enabled on the Monitoring API.

For metrics enabled on the monitoring API full details can be found in our Kafka monitoring API documentaiton.

A separated Control Plane has now been enabled on Kafka clusters. This feature is significant as it allows for the separation of internal control and data requests (i.e. events processed by the brokers). This decoupling should improve responsiveness under heavy load. 

If you would like to try our Kafka or Kafka Connect service, login to our Management Console, create a test Kafka Connect cluster, and associate it with your Instaclustr managed Kafka cluster. If you haven’t created a Kafka cluster on our platform, create a test Kafka cluster and use the 30-day free trial. If you’d also like a free trial of a Kafka Connect cluster, please contact our Sales team.