Confluent Platform 6.1 is Available

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Good news! Confluent Platform 6.1 drops today. I will not lay out all the features in this post, because there’s a blog post for that, and also a summary video filmed fireside in my very own backyard. So let me sum up, and encourage you to follow those links if you want to know more.

  1. Multi-Region Clusters (MRC) got a lot easier to manage with the new Automatic Observer Promotion. An observer is a type of replica that is asynchronous with respect to produce acks; that is, it is replicating the partition leader, but a producer will never wait for it to be up to date. They are pivotal to multi-region or multi-DC clusters. Observers can turn into regular replicas when needed, but this used to be a manual process that had to be managed carefully. Now, computers do it for you. MRC just got a lot better!

  2. Personally I am careful just to get all my queries written properly the first time, but every once in a while you have to change a ksqlDB query after it’s running. This is doable, but often a manual process or at least somewhat tricky to script. Now, using the CREATE OR REPLACE and ALTER STREAM/ALTER TABLE statements, you can alter running queries without a second thought. (NOTE: Please actually think before altering queries.)

  3. ksqlDB gives you the IN predicate now, so you can issue pull queries on multiple keys in a table. This works just like the regular SQL IN predicate. Examples in the blog post if you want to see.

  4. The Cluster Registry is a new management tool introduced in Confluent Platform 6.0, allowing you to configure groups of clusters with a friendly name rather than a GUID. Apparently some of you didn’t like typing out GUIDs? Sheesh. Well, Cluster Registry is now integrated with Control Center, and gives you the ability to assign human-readable names to clusters. Given that you are a human, we think this is a good thing.

  5. Self-Balancing Clusters, another important feature from 6.0, automate the balancing of partitions between brokers in a cluster. In 6.1, the activity of this feature is now available in the Status API. It’s the kind of thing you might want to observe, so this should be a welcomed addition.

As always, there’s more to say, so remember to read the blog post, watch the video, and check out the release notes. Also, you know, go download it. Please. :slight_smile:

Tim

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