Hi Sisindri, It’s definitely a challenge to justify a major architecture change when everything is working just fine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it right? In my experience most environments I’ve worked with, Zookeeper is a more than adequate cluster management service. For small/medium sized use cases (ie: > 50MB/s throughput, >5K partitions, with < 1000 ms latencies etc.) Zookeeper works pretty great right out of the box, and I don’t see a huge push to change those environments at least from a performance perspective. For large/X-Large use cases (ie: < 1GB/s throughput, <10k partitions, > 1000ms latencies etc.) that’s where KRaft mode really is a game changer. Every time I’ve had to assist our Kafka customers with large/X-large environments, it has consistently been a Zookeeper issue.
That said there are still plenty of reasons for small/medium sized enterprises to migrate to KRaft, if for no other reason to keep our enterprise software up to date. With Zookeeper being fully deprecated in 4.0, everyone will have to migrate eventually or get left with unsupported environments that aren’t receiving security updates. So, with that in mind I would at the very least go ahead and upgrade to 3.9 even if you want to stay on Zookeeper. All metadata versions prior 3.3 will be incompatible with KRaft so getting your metadata version upgraded will position you better for the transition when you finally make the jump. Also, note there are some additional wire protocol issues with really old versions of Kafka that might necessitate additional interim upgrades to get to 3.9. I wrote a blog post about on the topic you might find useful here https://www.openlogic.com/blog/upgrade-kafka-4-planning As for production readiness, I would say yes, it’s definitely production ready. We actually recommend “green field” deployments deploy in KRaft mode avoiding Zookeeper altogether now. The community has done some great work getting to 3.9 and addressing a lot of the limitations and caveats that KRaft had in its early days. I’ve recently published a blog post you might find useful on that topic as well https://www.openlogic.com/blog/kafka-raft-mode . Also just fyi… we’ve received a lot of similar question from our customers, so we have been working on some LTS products around Zookeeper and pre-4.0 Kafka to help folks in similar situations extend the runway to 4.0 with additional support options and training. If any of that sounds useful definitely reach out! -- Thanks, Joe Carder | Enterprise Architect, Open Logic Perforce Software P: 866.399.6736 Visit us on: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube On 2025/03/21 11:55:01 Manabolu Sisindri wrote: > Hello everyone, > Can someone suggest here please. > > Regards, > Sisindri M. > > On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 7:33 AM Manabolu Sisindri > <ma...@gmail.com<mailto:ma...@gmail.com>> > wrote: > > > > > Hi Team, > > > > We’re evaluating whether to migrate to *KRaft mode* (Kafka 3.9.0) from > > our current Zookeeper-based setup. Given the stability of our current > > system, do you recommend migrating now, or should we continue with > > Zookeeper for the time being and plan the migration later? > > > > If we do migrate, can we consider *Kafka 3.9.0* as stable for production > > workloads, or are there any known limitations or issues in KRaft at this > > moment? > > > > Looking forward to your thoughts. > > -- > > Regards, > > Sisindri, > > 8317502751. > > > This e-mail may contain information that is privileged or confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete the e-mail and any attachments and notify us immediately.
