Red Hat’s Kafka support metamorphosises to 2.2.1 in AMQ Streams

Red Hat’s Kafka support metamorphosises to 2.2.1 in AMQ Streams

Red Hat has revamped the streaming element of its messaging suite, AMQ Streams, adding updated Kafka support.

Red Hat describes AMQ Streams as a “distributed backbone that allows microservices and other applications to share data with extremely high throughput and extremely low latency.” It was first introduced last November.

The updated v1.2 now includes support for Apache Kafka 2.2.1, the open source distributed streaming platform originally developed by LinkedIn. The most recent stable version of Kafka is 2.3.0, which debuted at the end of last month. Other changes include the ability to add or remove volumes from JBOD, while the number of container images for AMQ streams has been “significantly reduced”.

The new release also introduces previews of AMQ Streams HTTP bridge, which is a RESTful interface to streams, “without the need to interpret the Kafka protocol”. The HTTP Bridge supports http producer and consumer requests to produce and consume records, as well as create and delete consumers, amongst other tasks.

Also in preview are Debezium Change Data Capture connectors. Debezium is an open source distributed data capture platform, that,  when running in a container, “captures row-level changes to a database table and passes corresponding change events to AMQ streams on OpenShift Container Platform for further processing.”

Red Hat said AMQ Streams can now be installed on OpenShift 4.x manually, using YAML files, or through the OpenShift Container Platform Operator Hub. The release notes add that the product works with OpenShift 3.11 and 4.x, but 3.9 and 3.10 are no longer supported.