New With Confluent Platform 8.0: Stream Securely, Monitor Easily, and Scale Endlessly

At Confluent, we’re committed to building the world's leading data streaming platform, which gives you the ability to stream, connect, process, and govern all of your data and make it available wherever it’s needed—however it’s needed—in real time.

Today, we're excited to announce the release of Confluent Platform 8.0!

This release builds on Apache Kafka® 4.0, reinforcing our core capabilities as a data streaming platform. Below are the release highlights, and you can find additional details about the features in the release notes.

This launch focuses on removing operational complexity, strengthening data protection, and scaling Kafka more efficiently, with updates that modernize how you monitor clusters, secure sensitive data, and eliminate the overhead of Apache ZooKeeper™️.

New key capabilities:

• Easily monitor and manage your Kafka and Apache Flink® environments, using the next-gen Confluent Control Center.

• Simplify your Kafka architecture and unlock massive scalability by replacing ZooKeeper with KRaft.

• Protect your most sensitive data by encrypting individual fields within messages, using Client-Side field level encryption—now Generally Available (GA).

Join us on August 8, 2025, for a webinar and demo on the latest features in Confluent Platform.

KRaft Only – No More Apache ZooKeeper

The multiyear architectural revolution to remove ZooKeeper is finally complete. With the latest release of Confluent Platform, ZooKeeper is completely replaced by KRaft. KRaft provides major operational improvements to running Kafka, and it’s now available by default.

The removal of ZooKeeper in the latest version of Confluent Platform marks a major step forward in simplifying Kafka’s architecture and unlocking new levels of scalability and resilience. With the General Availability of KRaft mode, Kafka now handles its own metadata management internally, eliminating the need for a separate system with its own tools, syntax, and operational overhead. This streamlining allows teams to deploy and operate Kafka with fewer moving parts, faster recovery from failovers, and a unified configuration and security model across the entire platform.

KRaft isn’t just a cleaner design; it’s a scalability breakthrough. By replacing ZooKeeper with a built-in Raft-based metadata quorum, Kafka can now support significantly larger clusters with millions of partitions, enabling right-sized infrastructure tuned to workload demands. Failover of the metadata controller is now near-instant, reducing downtime and improving operational reliability. For architects and operators, this means faster performance, easier upgrades, and a foundation built for long-term growth, without the complexity of managing ZooKeeper.

With Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) and Confluent Ansible Playbooks for Confluent Platform (Confluent Ansible), operators can automatically migrate live production clusters from using ZooKeeper to KRaft with no disruption to streaming workloads.

Next-Gen Control Center: 2x Faster Metrics, 3x More Partitions, 15x Faster Startup Time

At Current London, we announced the next generation of Confluent Control Center, which delivers a major leap forward in Kafka observability and operations. Now powered by a Prometheus-based architecture, Control Center is engineered to support high-throughput, large-scale Kafka environments with significantly improved performance and efficiency. By integrating with the open telemetry protocol (OTLP) and removing the requirement for a separate Kafka cluster to store metrics, it simplifies the architecture and reduces resource overhead.

Operational gains are substantial, with support for up to 400K partitions (including replication)—more than 3x the previous threshold. Metrics freshness has improved to within 2–3 minutes end to end, reducing lag by more than 50%, while service startup and recovery times have dropped from 15–50 minutes to just 1 minute. These enhancements allow operators and developers to monitor and troubleshoot large Kafka deployments with greater speed and precision, improving reliability while reducing complexity across the board. For a deeper dive, check out the blog.

With the latest release of Control Center, we’re introducing Confluent Manager for Apache Flink® (CMF) directly within Control Center, giving you a centralized, intuitive interface for managing stream processing workloads. Through the Control Center user interface, you can now create, modify, and monitor Flink environments and applications—all without leaving the platform.

With full visibility into Flink clusters and application life cycles, users can track application instances over time, monitor health through life cycle events, and make changes to environments and jobs in just a few clicks. Whether you're spinning up a new Flink environment or managing production pipelines, Control Center now provides the operational control and observability needed to run Flink with confidence alongside your Kafka deployments. For more details, check out the release notes.

Client-Side Field Level Encryption Is Now Generally Available

Client-side field level encryption (CSFLE) on Confluent Platform is now Generally Available! CSFLE complements our existing suite of enterprise-grade security features, such as data-in-transit encryption via Transport Layer Security (TLS) and role-based access controls (RBAC), and provides an additional layer of security to safeguard your most sensitive data throughout its life cycle.

For organizations in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, there's often a need for even tighter data protection, especially for sensitive information like personally identifiable information (PII). CSFLE allows you to encrypt individual fields within messages on the producer side, ensuring that only authorized users or applications can decrypt and access data.

With CSFLE, organizations can:

• Improve the security of sensitive data and adhere to strict compliance requirements.

• Maintain flexible and granular access control regarding the specific fields to encrypt.

• Lower total cost of ownership and operational complexity by reducing the need for topic duplication.

We look forward to continuing to expand governance capabilities for on-premises and hybrid environments. To get started using CSFLE, upgrade to Confluent Platform 8.0.

Additional Features and Updates

• Confluent Platform for Apache Flink® now includes FlinkSQL (Open Preview) capabilities in Confluent Manager for Apache Flink®, accessible via REST and the Confluent CLI. Learn more.

• Queues for Kafka is now in Early Access for Confluent Platform customers. Support for share groups introduces a powerful new consumption model designed for queue-style use cases. Share groups bring native, cooperative consumption to Kafka—allowing multiple consumers to share partitions, process messages independently, and track delivery for queue-style workloads with no need to over-partition.

• Confluent Platform Community version will transition to follow the Kafka release cycle more closely. Confluent Community software will follow the Kafka community support schedule, providing one year of patch support for a Kafka version from the minor version release date. Confluent customers using a Confluent Enterprise license will continue to receive patch updates for up to three years following a minor version release.

• Passwordless authentication is now available for Confluent Server and Schema Registry. It’s extended on top of Confluent Platform OAuth client credentials grant type, which uses a pre-signed assertion rather than a static client credential. CFK and Confluent Ansible can be used for deployment with Confluent Server and Schema Registry for passwordless authentication.

Confluent for Kubernetes (CFK) Updates

CFK provides a declarative API-driven control plane to deploy and manage Confluent Platform on Kubernetes. CFK 2.11.1 allows you to deploy and manage Confluent Platform versions from 7.1.x to 7.9.x on Kubernetes versions 1.25 - 1.32 (OpenShift 4.12 -4.18). For details on installing CFK and Confluent Platform, see Deploy Confluent for Kubernetes and Deploy Confluent Platform Using Confluent for Kubernetes.

With this release, CFK now supports seamless deployment and integration of the new Confluent Control Center. Use this version of CFK to deploy both the new Control Center and the legacy version side by side to validate functionality and ensure a smooth transition. This flexibility gives operators time to test and migrate with confidence, ahead of the full deprecation of the legacy Control Center in Confluent Platform 8.0.

For the full details on the latest in CFK, check out the release notes.

Confluent Ansible Updates

Confluent Ansible 8.0.0 allows you to deploy Confluent Platform version 8.0.0. This release supports Ansible Core versions 9.x to 11.x and Python versions 3.10 and above. For more information, see Prerequisites for Installing Confluent Platform With Ansible Playbooks.

Ansible Playbooks will now follow an independent release cadence, enabling faster updates and broader compatibility across Confluent Platform versions starting from 8.0, giving operators more flexibility and agility in automation. We’re also introducing full IPv6 support to help organizations modernize their network stacks and meet evolving infrastructure requirements. Finally, for teams looking to strengthen security, we’ve added support for upgrading non-RBAC deployments to RBAC and enabling mutual TLS (mTLS) in existing brownfield environments, making it simpler to adopt robust access controls and encryption without starting from scratch.

For the full details on the latest in Confluent Ansible, check out the release notes.

Built on Apache Kafka® 4.0

Confluent Platform 8.0 is built on Apache Kafka version 4.0 and will remove compatibility for legacy clients. Moving forward, clients must use Apache Kafka 2.1 or newer. This follows Apache Kafka KIP-896, which was implemented in Apache Kafka 3.7, and marked these older versions as deprecated. Clients older than Java 2.1.0 are generally affected, and any Kafka client version released before 2021 is likely affected. For complete details on the specific client protocol API versions being removed, refer to the release notes.

In line with the support policy for self-managed connectors, effective upon the release of Confluent Platform 8.0, some self-managed connectors will be deprecated. For more information, see Deprecated Connectors. Additionally, a specific minimum version of connectors will be required for support. For more information, see Supported Connector Versions in Confluent Platform 8.0.

You’re welcome to use the full extent of your support plan to remain on supported Confluent Platform versions until you are ready to upgrade to Confluent Platform 8.0. Our Professional Services team can work with you to migrate from deprecated clients to compliant, stable, and performant clients. In the meantime, consult the official Apache Kafka 4.0 upgrade guide for step-by-step instructions for performing the upgrade, considerations for rolling upgrades, and crucial information about potential breaking changes or compatibility issues that may arise during the upgrade process.

For more details about Apache Kafka 4.0, read the blog post.

Demo Webinar: How to Achieve Enterprise-Grade Security and Automate Kafka Operations

Join us on August 8, 2025, for a webinar and demo on the latest features in Confluent Platform.

Get Started Today

Download Confluent Platform 8.0 today to get started with the only cloud-native and comprehensive platform for data in motion, built by the original creators of Apache Kafka.

The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change. Customers should make their purchase decisions based on services, features, and functions that are currently available.

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