Chapter 1. Features
The features added in this release, and that were not in previous releases of AMQ Streams, are outlined below.
1.1. Kafka 2.5.0 support
AMQ Streams now supports Apache Kafka version 2.5.0.
AMQ Streams uses Kafka 2.5.0. Only Kafka distributions built by Red Hat are supported.
For upgrade instructions, see AMQ Streams and Kafka upgrades.
Refer to the Kafka 2.4.0 and Kafka 2.5.0 Release Notes for additional information.
Kafka 2.4.x is supported in AMQ Streams 1.5 only for upgrade purposes.
For more information on supported versions, see the Red Hat AMQ 7 Component Details Page on the Customer Portal.
1.2. ZooKeeper 3.5.8 support
Kafka 2.5.0 requires ZooKeeper version 3.5.8. Therefore, the first step involved in upgrading to AMQ Streams 1.5 is to upgrade ZooKeeper to version 3.5.8, as described in AMQ Streams and Kafka upgrades.
Refer to the ZooKeeper 3.5.8 Release Notes for additional information. Note the changes to the configuration format introduced in ZooKeeper 3.5.7.
If you are upgrading from a ZooKeeper version earlier than version 3.5.7, because of configuration changes introduced in that release, you will need to perform some additional upgrade steps. For more information, refer to the Release Notes for AMQ Streams 1.4 on RHEL and the steps for upgrading AMQ Streams 1.4 on RHEL.
1.3. MirrorMaker 2.0
Support for MirrorMaker 2.0 moves out of Technology Preview to a generally available component of AMQ Streams.
MirrorMaker 2.0 is based on the Kafka Connect framework, with connectors managing the transfer of data between clusters.
MirrorMaker 2.0 uses:
- Source cluster configuration to consume data from the source cluster
- Target cluster configuration to output data to the target cluster
MirrorMaker 2.0 introduces an entirely new way of replicating data in clusters. If you choose to use MirrorMaker 2.0, there is currently no legacy support, so any resources must be manually converted into the new format.
1.4. Debezium for change data capture integration
Red Hat Debezium is a distributed change data capture platform. It captures row-level changes in databases, creates change event records, and streams the records to Kafka topics. Debezium is built on Apache Kafka. You can deploy and integrate Debezium with AMQ Streams. Following a deployment of AMQ Streams, you deploy Debezium as a connector configuration through Kafka Connect. Debezium passes change event records to AMQ Streams on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Applications can read these change event streams and access the change events in the order in which they occurred.
Debezium has multiple uses, including:
- Data replication
- Updating caches and search indexes
- Simplifying monolithic applications
- Data integration
- Enabling streaming queries
Debezium provides connectors (based on Kafka Connect) for the following common databases:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SQL Server
- MongoDB
For more information on deploying Debezium with AMQ Streams, refer to the product documentation.
