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Kafka Streams News - November 2025
- Michelin is contributing a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) feature to Kafka Streams, landing in the upcoming Apache Kafka 4.2.0 release. It’s inspired by their kstreamplify library for Kafka Streams. This work is covered under KIP-1034.
- Apache Kafka 4.1.1 is out as a bug-fix release, with several Kafka Streams fixes — including a critical memory leak fix. Details here: release notes
- Confluent introduced a new Kafka Streams Monitoring UI in Confluent Cloud. It includes richer per-thread metrics, RocksDB stats, CPU breakdowns, and more—available when running client version 4.0+. Read about it here.
- My Prometheus-based Grafana dashboard for Kafka Streams was recently merged into the kineticedge repository, now featured alongside several open-source dashboard templates. Full context on the dashboard: Kafka Streams Grafana dashboard article
- Gang Tao wrote a good overview of Kafka Streams: Kafka Streams — A Lean and Agile King’s Army
- I created an interactive simulation of the Kafka Streams architecture. Explore it here.
- Matthias J. Sax, technical lead for Kafka Streams at Confluent, was interviewed on the Confluent Developer podcast. Watch it here.
- These Current New Orleans 2025 sessions about Kafka Streams are now available to watch on demand:
- Bite Size Topologies: Learning Kafka Streams Concepts One Topology at a Time by Neil Buesing
- The Curious Case of Streaming Windows by Matthias J Sax
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