Two packs at once. Free play completes its topology ladder with the 3-DC stretched and 2.5-DC witness clusters, and 19 new scenarios cover the log's lifecycle — retention, compaction, tiered storage — plus the KRaft control plane and the operations you run against a live cluster.
Exactly-once, read_committed and the last stable offset, begin/commit/abort, and the consume–process–produce loop. The transactions module makes EOS — Kafka's hardest topic — something you can step through. Free play also gains a new cluster type: active/active.
Monedula GitOps manages Kafka topics, access, quotas, schemas, users, and Confluent RBAC from version-controlled manifests, through either a CLI or a Kubernetes operator.
The replication module arrives: ISR mechanics, the high watermark, acks=all and min.insync.replicas, leader election and what an unclean election actually loses. Twelve scenarios on the guarantees Kafka is famous for.
Consumer groups, assignment strategies, static membership and the two timeouts that decide when a member is gone. Ten new scenarios that make the rebalance — Kafka's most misunderstood moment — something you can watch instead of guess at.
Kafka Simulator v1.1 adds ten scenarios covering producer batching, partitioning, compression, backpressure, retries, and idempotence.
KIP-714 lets Kafka clients push their own metrics to brokers over OTLP. monedula-metrics-reporter now forwards those metrics too, next to broker SPI and Yammer metrics.
Kafka's most important lessons live in the transitions: before and after a broker dies, before and after the ISR shrinks. We built a browser-based simulator so you can break a cluster safely and watch exactly why it reacts the way it does.
Moving an existing Kafka estate from ACLs to Confluent RBAC is a risk-management exercise, not a syntax conversion. Here's a safe, auditable, repeatable migration workflow — and the tool we built for it.
Why Kafka metrics are painful, why JMX dashboards often show no data, and how to export Kafka metrics natively over OTLP.