Chapter 9. Supported Configurations

Streams for Apache Kafka 3.1 is supported on all versions of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that are in Full or Maintenance support. For more information, see the following articles:

While support covers all current OpenShift versions, the following table lists the specific platform versions that were tested at the time of the Streams for Apache Kafka 3.1 release. Latest refers to the latest stable version available and tested at the time of the release.

Unsupported features:

Streams for Apache Kafka is designed for FIPS. Streams for Apache Kafka container images are based on RHEL 9.2, which contains cryptographic modules submitted to NIST for approval.

To check which versions of RHEL are approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), see the Cryptographic Module Validation Program on the NIST website.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is designed for FIPS. When running on RHEL or RHEL CoreOS booted in FIPS mode, OpenShift Container Platform core components use the RHEL cryptographic libraries submitted to NIST for FIPS validation only on the x86_64, ppc64le (IBM Power), s390x (IBM Z), and aarch64 (64-bit ARM) architectures. For more information about the NIST validation program, see Cryptographic Module Validation Program. For the latest NIST status for the individual versions of the RHEL cryptographic libraries submitted for validation, see Compliance Activities and Government Standards.

Only client libraries built by Red Hat are supported for Streams for Apache Kafka. Currently, Streams for Apache Kafka only provides a Java client library, which is tested and supported on kafka-clients-4.0.0.redhat-00013 and newer. Clients are supported for use with Streams for Apache Kafka 3.1 on the following operating systems and architectures:

Clients are tested with OpenJDK 17 and 21. RHEL 10 is supported on Java 21 only. The IBM JDK is supported but not regularly tested against during each release.

Support for Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) versions correspond to the same RHEL version.

In Streams for Apache Kafka, only the following components released directly from the Apache Software Foundation are supported:

See also, Chapter 11, Supported integration with Red Hat products.

Streams for Apache Kafka Console is supported on the most recent stable releases of Firefox, Edge, Chrome and Webkit-based browsers.

Cores used by Red Hat components and product operators do not count against subscription limits. Additionally, cores or vCPUs allocated to KRaft controller-only nodes or ZooKeeper nodes are excluded from subscription compliance calculations and do not count towards a subscription.

Streams for Apache Kafka has been tested with block storage and is compatible with the XFS and ext4 file systems, which are commonly used with Kafka. File-based storage options, such as NFS, are not tested or supported for primary broker storage and may cause instability or degraded performance.

Kafka tiered storage is supported as an optional capability. For the remote storage tier, AWS S3 and NFS-backed storage are tested and supported. Other S3-compatible or cloud-based object storage systems might also work, but they have not been tested. If using an untested storage backend, evaluate performance and compatibility in your environment before using it in production.