The introduction of Kafka Share Groups fundamentally re-architects Kafka to decouple consumer scaling from partition count, enabling queue-like consumption over standard topics.

This talk focuses on the essential protocol enhancements introduced in Apache Kafka 4.2 that bridge the gap to queue semantics. Specifically, will detail, KIP-1206: Record Limit and Batch Optimized Behaviour, which improves the records delivery mechanism to enable work-queue-like workloads; KIP-1222: Records Lease Renew, which provides a mechanism for applications to process records which takes longer processing time; KIP-1226: Share Lag Computation, which enables the auto scaler to monitor the share lag for the group to manage horizontal scaling.

Attendees will gain a clear, actionable understanding of the resiliency associated with long-running tasks, workload optimization and operational scaling associated with the share groups.