Quarkus Community Call - 2026-03-31

[cescoffier]

Hello,

Yesterday, we had our latest public Quarkus community call focused on the evolution of Kafka support.
Here is a short summary. You can find the complete minutes (including the recording) on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TgFZsuOQo9qZ4CnQII5LHhQVgMC6YsVMs1UJIAJooyM/edit?usp=sharing.

Recap:

Ozan Gunalp introduced the highly anticipated Kafka Queues (KIP-932) support, now available in Kafka 4.2 and coming to Quarkus 3.35. The core shift is the introduction of Shared Groups, which allow records to be assigned to consumers individually rather than by partition. This effectively removes the horizontal scaling cap tied to partition counts.

We discussed the technical implementation of the Shared Coordinator and the new record state lifecycle (Available, Acquired, Acknowledged). A key highlight is how Quarkus handles the 30-second record lock constraint: the framework will automatically "renew" leases for long-running tasks so your consumers can keep polling without hitting timeouts.

Beyond queues, we covered several performance and stability updates:

• Request-Reply is now in Technical Preview.
• Ordered Processing by key/partition is now supported even when offloading to worker or virtual threads.
• Pooled Producers now allow for concurrent transactions on a single topic.
• Startup optimizations allow disabling JMX to shave up to 100ms off boot time.