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The Apache Kafka community is proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka 4.1.0. This blog post highlights the many new features and improvements included in this release. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes. Queues for Kafka (KIP-932) is now in preview. It's still not ready for production, but you can start evaluating and testing it. See the preview release notes for more details. This release also introduces a new Streams Rebalance Protocol (KIP-1071) in early access.

From weeks-long projects to self-service data distribution.

AWS MSK has become popular because it deploys Kafka easily and bills alongside other AWS services. Over the past few years, AWS announced Express Brokers, a new cluster type that offers unlimited storage and separates brokers from storage resources. This simplifies scaling and reduces the time needed to rebalance topics when adding or removing brokers.

A data contract is a formal agreement between an upstream component and a downstream component on the structure and semantics of data that’s in motion. In a previous post, I showed how Confluent Schema Registry supports data contracts. By combining data contracts and encryption on streaming workloads, you can shift left the responsibility of data consistency, quality, and security to the producer, allowing the consumer to depend on a trustworthy stream of data.