Gantigmaa Selenge is a Senior Software Engineer working on Red Hat Streams for Apache Kafka, where she focuses on adapting the Apache Kafka ecosystem to be offered as a distributed and high-performance data streaming platform. She contributes to the development of both Apache Kafka and Strimzi and enjoys presenting at and attending conferences. She has presented at Kafka Summit London, KubeCon Europe and Devoxx UK. Prior to her current role, she worked on IBM Event Streams where she gained experience in deploying Apache Kafka on Kubernetes and running it as a managed cloud service.
The long awaited removal of Apache ZooKeeper as an Apache Kafka dependency is here. From version 4.0 onwards (released March 2025) ZooKeeper is no longer supported, and users must instead deploy Kafka with a quorum of Kafka controllers using the new KRaft consensus protocol. In the first half of this session we will introduce this new architecture and explain how it differs from ZooKeeper based Kafka clusters. We’ll look at the different deployment options, clarify terminology, and explore some benefits it brings (beyond simply removing ZooKeeper).
In the second half of this session we will take a deeper dive into how managing a KRaft cluster is different from a ZooKeeper based one. As a Kubernetes operator for Kafka, the CNCF project Strimzi has had to evolve to meet these new requirements. So we’ll share some of the lessons we learnt along the way, from managing migration, to determining liveness and readiness, to orchestrating rolling updates.
Whether you’re new to Kafka, or an experienced Kafka administrator, this is your chance to brush up on your knowledge of deploying and managing a KRaft-based Kafka cluster.
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