Amazon MSK introduces KRaft support for Express Brokers with Apache Kafka v3.9

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.9 for Express Brokers. This release introduces support for KRaft (Kafka Raft), Apache Kafka's new consensus protocol that eliminates the dependency on Apache ZooKeeper for metadata management. KRaft shifts metadata management in Kafka clusters from external Apache ZooKeeper nodes to a group of controllers within Kafka. This change allows metadata to be stored and replicated as topics within Kafka brokers, resulting in faster propagation of metadata.

New Express Broker clusters created using Kafka v3.9 will automatically use KRaft as the metadata management mode, giving you the benefits of this modern architecture from the start. The ability to upgrade existing clusters to v3.9 will be available in a future release.

Amazon MSK Express Brokers with Kafka v3.9 are available in all AWS regions where MSK Express is supported. To get started, create a new Express Broker cluster and select Kafka version 3.9 in the AWS Management Console or via the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs.