Jason Gustafson and Colin McCabe, Apache Kafka® developers, discuss the project to remove ZooKeeper—now known as the KRaft (Kafka on Raft) project. A previous episode of Streaming Audio featured both developers on the podcast before the release of Apache Kafka 2.8. Now they’re back to share their progress.

The KRraft code has been merged (and continues to be merged) in phases. Both developers talk about the foundational Kafka Improvement Proposals (KIPs), such as KIP-595: a Raft protocol for Kafka, and KIP-631: the quorum-based Kafka controller. The idea going into this new release was to give users a chance to try out no-ZooKeeper mode for themselves. 

There are a lot of exciting milestones on the way for KRaft. The next release will feature Raft snapshot support, as well as support for running with security authorizers enabled.  

EPISODE LINKS

• KIP-500: Apache Kafka Without ZooKeeper ft. Colin McCabe and Jason Gustafson
• What’s New in Apache Kafka 2.8
• Watch the video version of this podcast
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