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# Confluent Gateway Release Notes

This topic summarizes the technical details of the Confluent Gateway releases for
Confluent Platform.

## Confluent Gateway add-on for Confluent Platform

Confluent Gateway is available as an add-on to Confluent Platform. The add-on is based on
Confluent Gateway 1.4. It sits between your Apache Kafka® clients and your Confluent Platform clusters,
whether they run on virtual machines (VMs) or on Kubernetes, and routes and
governs the traffic between them. The add-on supports the following
capabilities:

* Cluster switchover for disaster recovery and migrations, without client
  changes or application restarts.
* Centralized data governance enforcement against Confluent Schema Registry, including schema
  validation and field-level or full-payload encryption through data contract
  rules. Governance requires Schema Registry 8.4 or later. For configuration steps, see
  [Enforce Data Governance Centrally with Confluent Gateway](governance/gateway-governance.md#gateway-governance). To configure governance with Confluent for Kubernetes, see
  [Enforce Centralized Governance for Confluent Gateway using Confluent for
  Kubernetes](https://docs.confluent.io/operator/current/gateway/co-gateway-governance.html).
* Incremental topic migration with topic-based routing and fencing, so you can
  move topics between Kafka clusters while clients keep using the same bootstrap
  address. For more information, see
  [Migrate Topics Incrementally with Topic-Based Routing and Fencing](gateway-topic-based-routing.md#gateway-topic-based-routing).
* Centralized authentication with mTLS, Simple Authentication and Security
  Layer (SASL), OAuth, or OpenID Connect (OIDC), and authentication swapping
  between clients and brokers.
* Secure external partner access through dedicated endpoints.
* Blue-green Kafka version upgrades by switching a route to the new cluster,
  with immediate rollback.
* Custom domains for Kafka listeners.
* Secret store integration with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager,
  Azure Key Vault, and CyberArk Conjur.

#### NOTE
Dynamic routing, which topic-based routing uses, is an Early Access Program
feature. Its configuration schemas, including property names and YAML
structure, are subject to change before General Availability (GA) and might
not be backward compatible.

For more information, see [Confluent Gateway overview](overview.md#gateway-overview).
