TechnologyThursday, October 29, 20261 min read

Introducing Apache Kafka 4.4.0

By Engineering Blogs · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The update incorporates 25 Kafka Improvement Proposals and 963 commits since version 4.3.0, delivering wide-ranging bug fixes and system enhancements. Key platform updates include dead-letter queue support for share groups upgraded to share.version 2, asynchronous bootstrap DNS resolution, and mechanisms to curb tiered storage redundancy. Additionally, the release establishes strict storage directory compatibility rules and deprecates several legacy tools and metrics ahead of their planned removal in Kafka 5.0.

Key points

Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay upload…: Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay uploads to mitigate tiered storage redundancy.
Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-v…: Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-versions.sh tool are now officially deprecated.
The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prio…: The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prior to its planned deletion in Kafka 5.0.

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By Omnia Ibrahim | Thursday, October 22, 2026

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 4.4.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent ones. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

With 25 KIPs and 963 commits since 4.3.0, this release introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes to all the components.

See the Upgrading to 4.4 section in the documentation for the list of notable changes and detailed upgrade steps.

KIP-1232: Deprecate broker.id config Deprecates the broker.id broker configuration.

KIP-1200: Deprecate ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata Deprecates the ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method and will be removed in Kafka 5.0. Custom implementations of ClientQuotaCallback no longer need to override this method, as a default no-op implementation is now provided.

KIP-1301: Deprecate Yammer-based metrics in GroupCoordinatorMetrics Deprecates the remaining Yammer-based classic-group metrics in GroupCoordinatorMetrics (NumGroups, NumOffsets, NumGroupsPreparingRebalance, NumGroupsCompletingRebalance, NumGroupsStable, NumGroupsDead), replacing them with equivalent Kafka Metrics gauges registered under the kafka.server:type=group-coordinator-metrics MBean.

KIP-1170: Unify cluster metadata bootstrapping Storage directories formatted by the kafka-storage tool are no…

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Key Points

Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay upload…: Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay uploads to mitigate tiered storage redundancy.
Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-v…: Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-versions.sh tool are now officially deprecated.
The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prio…: The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prior to its planned deletion in Kafka 5.0.

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Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay upload…: Administrators can now unregister controllers using administrative tools and delay uploads to mitigate tiered storage redundancy.
Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-v…: Multiple legacy elements including the broker.id configuration and the kafka-broker-api-versions.sh tool are now officially deprecated.
The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prio…: The ClientQuotaCallback#updateClusterMetadata method has been marked for deprecation prior to its planned deletion in Kafka 5.0.

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Introducing Apache Kafka 4.4.0

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