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As always, we bring you news, updates and recommended content from the hectic world of Apache Kafka® and stream processing.
Sometimes it seems that in Apache Kafka every improvement is preceded by an involved KIP process. This month we’ve merged a great patch that improved the 99% latency of Kafka without requiring user visible changes: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-4614. Not only does it make a fast system even faster, the JIRA itself is worthy of study. I wish all JIRAs included this level of research.
Some important improvements do require KIPs. Here is what we’ve seen in active discussions this month:
Notable Blogs and Presentations:
Confluent, powered by Kafka, is the real-time backbone for agentic systems built with Google Cloud. It enables agents to access fresh data (MCP) and communicate seamlessly (A2A) via a decoupled architecture. This ensures scalability, resilience, and observability for complex, intelligent workflows.
AWS Lambda's Kafka Event Source Mapping now supports Confluent Schema Registry. This update simplifies building event-driven applications by eliminating the need for custom code to deserialize Avro/Protobuf data. The integration makes it easier and more efficient to leverage Confluent Cloud.