Get Kafka-Nated Espresso: Biweekly Roundup October 16th - October 30th, 2025
Your concentrated shot of Apache Kafka® community news.
This week I’m writing from Current New Orleans surrounded by the streaming community! It’s a great event and it’s been awesome to have the chance to speak to some friends old and new at the event.
Featured: Get Kafka-Nated Episode 9 - Live from Current New Orleans
I had an absolute blast interviewing no fewer than twelve amazing people at Current, half of whom I interviewed live this morning. Check out the recording below for Kafka war stories, news from Current, and some streaming community good vibes.
Watch the space for the remaining recorded interviews from Current which will be uploaded in the coming weeks.
Worth a Read
Tom Scott published a brilliant article covering the ever growing list of Kafka to Iceberg write implementations that people are working on exploring the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tom knows a thing or two about this given that he and his team founded Streambased to build a zero-copy Kafka to object storage product more than two years ago!
Read it here.
Contributor to Get Kafka-Nated Stanislav Kozlovski shared his thoughts on Kafka vs Postgres for low volume messaging in an insightful blog diving deep on the technical and performance considerations for both solutions. Read it here.
KIP Watch - The Last Two Weeks in Kafka Improvement Proposals
Release Updates
The Kafka 4.1.1 emergency release that dominated the last period has successfully shipped, addressing the critical memory leak in Kafka Streams 4.1.0. The quick turnaround from bug discovery to release demonstrates the community’s ability to mobilize when users are blocked by critical issues.
Meanwhile, Kafka 4.0.1 has completed voting and should be available soon, clearing the backlog of bugfixes that had accumulated.
Christo Lolov continues managing the Kafka 4.2.0 release targeted for January 2026, with feature freeze discussions beginning to surface on the mailing list.
Active Discussions
KIP-1222: Acquisition lock timeout renewal in share consumer explicit mode and KIP-1206: Strict max fetch records in share fetch continue progressing through review cycles, with both targeting inclusion in Kafka 4.2. The share group consumer functionality is seeing steady refinement as more users begin testing these patterns in pre-production environments.
KIP-1121: Compression Acceleration voting has concluded, though final results haven’t been formally announced as of this writing.
That’s all for this week, time to head back to the UK with a warm fuzzy feeling (and some jetlag) after hanging out with this awesome community all week.
Sources & Further Reading