What’s New in Redpanda

This topic includes new content added in version 25.3. For a complete list of all product updates, see the Redpanda release notes. See also:

Shadowing

Redpanda v25.3 introduces Shadowing, an enterprise-licensed disaster recovery solution that provides asynchronous, offset-preserving replication between distinct Redpanda clusters. Shadowing enables cross-region data protection by replicating topic data, configurations, consumer group offsets, ACLs, and Schema Registry data with byte-level fidelity.

The shadow cluster operates in read-only mode while continuously receiving updates from the source cluster. During a disaster, you can failover individual topics or an entire shadow link to make resources fully writable for production traffic. See Failover Runbook for emergency procedures.

Connected client monitoring

You can view details about Kafka client connections using rpk or the Admin API ListKafkaConnections endpoint. This allows you to view detailed information about active client connections on a cluster, and identify and troubleshoot problematic clients. For more information, see Monitor Redpanda.

New Admin API endpoints

Redpanda v25.3 introduces a new API style for the Admin API, powered by ConnectRPC. New Redpanda features and operations in v25.3 are available as ConnectRPC services, allowing you to use autogenerated Protobuf clients in addition to using HTTP clients such as curl.

Use the new ConnectRPC endpoints with the following v25.3 features:

  • Shadowing

  • Connected client monitoring

Existing Admin API endpoints from versions earlier than 25.3 remain supported, and you can continue to use them as usual. See Manage Redpanda with the Admin API to learn more about Admin API, and the Admin API reference to view the new endpoints.

Schema Registry import mode

Redpanda Schema Registry now supports an import mode that allows you to import existing schemas and retain their current IDs and version numbers. Import mode is useful when migrating from another schema registry.

Starting with this release, import mode must be used when importing schemas. Read-write mode no longer allows specifying a schema ID and version when registering a schema. See Use the Schema Registry API for more information.