Apache Kafka End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform originally developed at LinkedIn, used for building real-time data pipelines, messaging systems, and stream processing applications at scale. It's one of the most widely deployed pieces of data infrastructure in production, underpinning everything from log aggregation to event-driven microservices.

Apache Kafka Lifecycle Explained

Apache Kafka ships a new minor version roughly every three to four months, and the Apache Software Foundation's own community support for a version generally ends once the next one or two releases have shipped, sometimes retiring several older minor lines on the same date rather than one at a time. Separately, a longer Confluent Community Support window exists for most versions, tracked here as well, since it's a commonly referenced practical end date for teams not using Confluent's own commercial product but relying on its published timelines as a secondary reference point.

The single biggest lifecycle event in Kafka's history is the removal of ZooKeeper in version 4.0, released March 18, 2025. For over a decade, Kafka depended on Apache ZooKeeper to manage cluster metadata; 4.0 replaced it entirely with KRaft, Kafka's own built-in Raft-based consensus system, and removed ZooKeeper mode outright rather than just deprecating it. This means clusters still running ZooKeeper mode cannot upgrade directly to 4.0, they must first migrate to KRaft mode on a 3.x release. Kafka 3.9, the final version to support ZooKeeper at all, was given an extended 12-month critical fix window specifically because of that role, longer than a typical 3.x release would normally receive.