Chapter 3. New features and enhancements

To upgrade to Streams for Apache Kafka 3.0 or later, you must first migrate your Kafka clusters to KRaft mode.

As a technology preview, the Metrics Reporter exposes Kafka metrics directly over HTTP in a Prometheus-compatible format.

Streams for Apache Kafka 3.1 and later contains the Red Hat Lightspeed Java client. The Red Hat Lightspeed Java client is enabled for Streams for Apache Kafka only if Streams for Apache Kafka is installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and the RHEL system has Red Hat Lightspeed client installed, configured, and registered. For more information, see the Client Configuration Guide for Red Hat Lightspeed.

The Red Hat Lightspeed dashboard for Runtimes will be available in a future release on Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Similar to the RHEL dashboard which is available on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, the Runtimes dashboard will show the inventory of the Runtimes installations, CVE details, and help you select the JVM options.

You can opt-out of the Red Hat Lightspeed client by setting the environment variable RHT_Lightspeed_JAVA_OPT_OUT to true. For more information, see the knowledge base article Red Hat Lightspeed for Runtimes.

Kafka Bridge now includes a validation_errors field in the error response JSON when a schema validation error occurs. This field is part of the Error OpenAPI component and is omitted for other error types.