Confluent Platform 7.5 Release Notes

7.5 is a major release of Confluent Platform that provides you with Apache Kafka® 3.5, the latest stable version of Kafka.

The technical details of this release are summarized below.

For more information about the 7.5 release, check out the release blog.

Kafka brokers

Confluent Server

Cluster Linking has several new options:

  • Bidirectional mode for newly created cluster links. This can sync data in metadata in either direction between 2 clusters. The consumer offset sync enabled by this mode is crucial when using Cluster Linking for disaster recovery.
  • The ability to start mirror topic replication from the latest message, or from any timestamp in the log.
  • The ability to have mirror topics set a different retention period than their source topic.

Confluent Community / Kafka

Confluent Platform 7.5 features Kafka 3.5. For a full list of the KIPs, features, and bug fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes. For a summary of the improvements and changes in version 3.4, see Kafka 3.5 New Features and Updates on the Confluent blog, or the Kafka 3.5 release video that follows.

  • This release marks ZooKeeper as deprecated for Confluent Platform for new deployments. Confluent recommends KRaft mode for new deployments. A full KRaft timeline can be found in KIP-833.

  • In Confluent Platform 7.5, improvements to KRaft mode have been made to further improve parity with ZooKeeper mode.

    • Support for Multi-region clusters (new clusters only)
    • SASL SCRAM support
    • RBAC in KRaft combined mode (Note that combined mode is still not supported for production workloads)

  • There are some features that are currently supported in ZooKeeper mode that are not yet supported in KRaft mode in Confluent Platform 7.5:

    • JBOD
    • Delegate Tokens
    • Quorum reconfiguration
    • TopicAclAuthorizer for Schema Registry

  • ZooKeeper to KRaft migrations for existing clusters is still Early Access in Confluent Platform 7.5, with the following exceptions:

    • Clusters with features that are currently not supported in KRaft mode.
    • You cannot migrate clusters with authorization that uses centralized ACLs.
    • Self-Balancing can’t be used while in ZooKeeper migration.

    For more information about migrating from ZooKeeper to KRaft, see Migrate from ZooKeeper to KRaft (EA). For more information on current limitations of KRaft mode, see Limitations and known issues.

Confluent Control Center

Single Sign-On (SSO) support for Control Center was added. You can now:

  • Implement Single Sign-On using any identity provider that supports industry standard Open ID Connect (OIDC)
  • Leverage additional security controls such as MFA through your identity provider.
  • Provide seamless and secure SSO experience for users accessing Confluent Control Center.
  • Automate the setup through either Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform or Confluent for Kubernetes for ease and convenience.

For more information, see Single Sign-On (SSO) for Confluent Control Center.

Cluster Management

Confluent for Kubernetes (formerly Confluent Operator)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an issue when REST Proxy starts faster than brokers and fails.

For the list of Confluent for Kubernetes release versions compatible with this release of Confluent Platform, see Confluent for Kubernetes. See the Confluent for Kubernetes Release Notes for more details.

Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform

New features

  • FIPS compliance for RHEL 8 and RHEL 9.
  • Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform playbooks to enable Confluent Control Center SSO.

For more information, see the Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform documentation.

How to download

Confluent Platform is available for download at https://confluent.io/download/. See the Install Confluent Platform On-Premises 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

As of Confluent Platform 7.4, Confluent Platform now supports RHEL 9.

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

Confluent CLI

Confluent Platform 7.5 ships with Confluent CLI version 3.2.1. To install and use a later version of the CLI, you must download and install an alternative CLI version using these instructions.

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.