Instaclustr for Apache Kafka® and Apache Kafka® Connect 3.9.0 Are Generally Available

February 25, 2025 | By Varun Ghai

NetApp is excited to announce the General Availability of Instaclustr for Apache Kafka®  and Kafka® Connect 3.9.0 on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform.    

The latest release from the Apache Kafka project, Kafka 3.9.0, is now available on the NetApp Instaclustr managed platform. It contains some major new features as well as lots of bugfixes, including those for tiered storage and for Apache ZooKeeper to KRaft migrations. Importantly, with this version, tiered storage has been marked as production-ready by the project. For customers of Instaclustr for Apache Kafka, we have previously  announced tiered storage as generally available for  Kafka 3.8.1 on our managed platform, this has since been superseded by Kafka 3.9.0 and we recommend all customers use this newer version. A full list of inclusions and changes can be found in the release notes. 

Some of the changes we feel our customers will care about are: 

• “Final and best iteration” of ZooKeeper to Kraft migration: The upcoming release marks the final opportunity before Kafka 4.0 for clusters running in ZooKeeper mode to migrate to Kraft. With major bugs related to the migration already fixed, NetApp Instaclustr is working towards automating the migration process to streamline it and minimize human error, aiming for availability in the first half of 2025. In preparation, customers are recommended to schedule upgrades to Kafka 3.9.0 to be ready for the future migration to KRaft. 

• KIP-950: With this new enhancement, it will now be possible to disable tiered storage on a per-topic basis (only for Kafka clusters running in Kraft mode). In previous Kafka releases, once tiered storage was enabled for any topic, it was not possible to disable it.  For customers wishing to make use of this, please reach out to our support team with information on the cluster ID and topics for which you would like tiered storage disabled. 

• KIP-956: The implementation for tiered storage in Kafka is designed to regularly identify data (i.e. rolled-over log segments) which is eligible to be offloaded to the remote storage.  This feature introduces new broker properties which allow quotas to be specified for rates at which log segments are uploaded to or read from remote storage. . This feature will help customers mitigate sudden increase in CPU utilisation or producer latency that can occur when tiered storage is initially enabled for multiple topics. If you’d like to have these new properties enabled, please reach out to our support team. 

With this new release, we have reviewed and updated the lifecycle states for our older supported Kafka versions (as per our lifecycle policy). To ensure you get the full benefit of our support and SLAs, please reach out to us and upgrade to a GA version. To stay on a supported version of Kafka, we advise customers upgrade their Kafka versions at least once a year to the latest GA version. More details on all Kafka versions supported on our managed platform are available here.  

Prior to deploying a new Kafka version in production, we recommend trying your preferred Kafka version in a non-production environment to confirm compatibility with your Kafka clients. If you need any help spinning up a new Kafka cluster or upgrading existing managed Kafka clusters, please feel free to get in touch with us via our support website.