Introducing Confluent Platform 5.5

Confluent has released version 5.5 of its Confluent Platform, which enhances three categories of features that complement Apache Kafka® and make it easier to build event streaming applications. The release includes support for Protobuf and JSON throughout its components, expanding the choice of serialization formats. Additionally, Confluent Platform 5.5 introduces exactly-once semantics to librdkafka-based clients by adding support for idempotent producer and transactions. This allows applications written in C/C++, Python, Go, or .NET to guarantee that messages processed by a given event streaming application will be processed exactly once. The release also adds several admin functions to the REST Proxy in preview mode and includes ksqlDB 0.7 with new features for building event streaming applications. Confluent Platform 5.5 is built on Apache Kafka version 2.5, which adds several new features such as OAuth support and a new Connector.