Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

We announced the Kong Premium Technology Partner Program at API Summit 2024, and Confluent was one of the first in the program. This initial development was all about ensuring that the relationship between Kong and Confluent — from a business and product perspective — fully represented our joint belief that the world of data streaming and the world of APIs are converging.

Organizations today face complex data challenges as they scale, with more distributed data architectures and a growing number of teams building streaming applications. They will need to implement Data Mesh principles for sharing data across business domains, ensure data sovereignty across different jurisdictions and clouds, and maintain real-time operations.

Kafka is a highly popular realtime data streaming platform, renowned for handling massive volumes of data with minimal latency. Typical use cases include handling user activity tracking, log aggregation and IoT telemetry. Kafka’s architecture, based on distributed partitions, allows it to scale horizontally across multiple brokers. But although Kafka excels at high data throughput, scaling it to manage thousands of client connections can be costly and complex.

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.