Confluent Platform 7.2 Release Notes

7.2 is a major release of Confluent Platform that provides you with Apache Kafka® 3.2.0, the latest stable version of Kafka.

The technical details of this release are summarized below.

For more information about the 7.2 release, check out the release blog.

Confluent Control Center

When HTTP Basic Authentication is enabled on Confluent Platform components, Confluent Control Center must also be configured properly to successfully proxy requests to those components. With Confluent Platform 7.2, Control Center now allows you to configure Basic Authentication for connections to Connect and ksqlDB, on top of the existing capability to configure Basic Authentication for connection to Schema Registry. For more information, see Configure HTTP Basic Authentication with Control Center.

Confluent Server

Cluster Linking now can add a prefix to the names of mirror topics, via the cluster link config cluster.link.prefix. This is useful for data sharing, active-active architectures, and data aggregation. The same prefix can optionally be applied to consumer group names, by using the consumer.group.prefix.enable parameter. Previously, a mirror topic name had to be identical to its source topic name. For more information, see the cluster.link.prefix documentation.

Confluent Community / Apache Kafka

Confluent Platform 7.2 features Apache Kafka® 3.2.0. For a full list of the KIPs, features, and bug fixes, take a look at the official Apache Kafka release notes, blog, or watch this overview of Kafka 3.2.0.

Known issues

There is a known performance issue with version 0.17.2 of the JMX reporter, which was enabled with Confluent Platform version 7.2.5 to address security vulnerabilities: CVE-2022-38750, CVE-2022-38751, and CVE-2022-25857. As a workaround, you can manually install an earlier version of the JMX reporter, but note that earlier versions may contain the security vulnerabilities.

Cluster Management

Confluent for Kubernetes (formerly Confluent Operator)

For the list of Confluent for Kubernetes release versions compatible with this release of Confluent Platform, see the Supported Versions and Interoperability.

You can find the release notes for the latest release of Confluent for Kubernetes here.

Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform

New features

You can obfuscate sensitive information in Confluent Platform component logs and then create a single bundle of those logs to share with Confluent Support.

Notable enhancements

You can configure CP-Ansible to use the JKS files existing on each worker node for TLS encryption. You don’t need to provide the JKS files on the Ansible control node. For more information, see Configure Encryption for Confluent Platform with Ansible Playbooks.

Upgrade considerations

CP-Ansible 7.2 does not support Ansible 2.9 or Python 2.x because those runtimes are end-of-life. Upgrade to Ansible 2.11+ or Python 3.6+ to use CP-Ansible 7.2.

Kafka Streams

New features

Rack awareness for standby replicas: You can distribute standby replicas over physical hardware or availability zones to improve fault tolerance. You can form a rack using tags in the application configuration. To specify tags that should be used to separate racks, use the rack.aware.assignment tags property.

ksqlDB

New features

  • JSON functions: This new functionality makes interacting with JSON in ksqlDB easier and more powerful. You can use the new functions to transform, validate, and inspect JSON-formatted strings.
  • Support for RIGHT joins: Express joins now support a more flexible syntax, which can better follow your mental model of relationships in your data.
  • Expose Kafka message headers to ksqlDB
  • Add utility functions for working with JSON data
  • Add ability to use an existing Schema Registry schema when creating streams and tables

Notable enhancements

  • Complex type support in aggregate functions: You can now operate over Maps, Arrays, and Structs when using popular UDAFs like COLLECT_LIST and LATEST_BY_OFFSET.
  • Support for complex Protobuf subjects: When you use Schema Registry to manage Protobuf subjects with multiple message types, you can now specify the Protobuf message type ksqlDB should use to assign schema to queries.
  • Improvements to aggregate functions to support complex types, like structs, arrays, and maps.
  • Support for push query continuation tokens in the Java API.
  • Better error handling for nested functions.
  • In the Java API and migrations tool, support for custom request headers and connector IF NOT EXISTS clauses.

Schema Registry

New goals and capabilities added to the Schema Registry Maven Plugin support faster and more efficient development and testing:

How to Download

Confluent Platform is available for download at https://www.confluent.io/download/. See the On-Premises Deployments for Confluent Platform section for detailed information.

Important

The Confluent Platform package includes Confluent Server by default and requires a confluent.license key in your server.properties file. Starting with Confluent Platform 5.4.x, the Confluent Server broker checks for a license during start-up. You must supply a license string in each broker’s properties file using the confluent.license property as below:

confluent.license=LICENCE_STRING_HERE_NO_QUOTES

If you want to use the Kafka broker, download the confluent-community package. The Kafka broker is the default in all Debian or RHEL and CentOS packages.

For more information about migrating to Confluent Server, see Migrate Confluent Platform to Confluent Server.

To upgrade Confluent Platform to a newer version, check the Upgrade Confluent Platform documentation.

Supported Versions and Interoperability

For the supported versions and interoperability of Confluent Platform and its components, see Supported Versions and Interoperability for Confluent Platform.

Questions?

If you have questions regarding this release, feel free to reach out via the community mailing list or community Slack. Confluent customers are encouraged to contact our support directly.