What’s New in Redpanda

This topic includes new content added in version 25.1. For a complete list of all product updates, see the Redpanda release notes. See also:

New health probes for broker restarts and upgrades

The Redpanda Admin API now includes new health probes to help you ensure safe broker restarts and upgrades. The pre_restart_probe endpoint identifies potential risks if a broker is restarted, and post_restart_probe indicates how much of its workloads a broker has reclaimed after the restart. See also:

Redpanda Console v3.0.0

The Redpanda Console v3.0.0 release includes the following updates:

New features

Redpanda Console now supports unified authentication and authorization between Console and Redpanda, including user impersonation. This means you can authenticate to Redpanda using the same credentials you use for Redpanda Console.

See Authentication for more information.

Breaking changes

  • Authentication and authorization:

    • Renamed the login stanza to authentication.

    • Renamed login.jwtSecret to authentication.jwtSigningSecret.

    • Removed the plain login provider.

    • OIDC group-based authorization is no longer supported.

    • Role bindings must now be configured in the authorization.roleBindings stanza (no longer stored in a separate file).

  • Schema Registry:

    • Moved from under the kafka stanza to a top-level schemaRegistry stanza.

    • All authentication settings for Schema Registry are now defined under schemaRegistry.authentication.

  • Admin API:

    • Authentication for the Redpanda Admin API is now defined under redpanda.adminApi.authentication.

  • Serialization settings:

    • Moved kafka.protobuf, kafka.cbor, and kafka.messagePack to a new top-level serde stanza.

    • The kafka.protobuf.schemaRegistry setting is deprecated. Use the top-level schemaRegistry stanza instead.

  • Connect:

    • Renamed the connect stanza to kafkaConnect to avoid ambiguity with Redpanda Connect.

  • Console settings:

    • Moved console.maxDeserializationPayloadSize to serde.console.maxDeserializationPayloadSize.

Other changes

The admin panel has been removed from the Redpanda Console UI. To manage users, use the Security page. To generate debug bundles, use the link on the Cluster overview page. To upload a new license, use the link on the Cluster overview page or in the license expiration warning banner.

Iceberg improvements

Iceberg-enabled topics now support custom partitioning for improved query performance, snapshot expiry, and a dead-letter queue for invalid records. Schema evolution is also supported with schema mutations implemented according to the Iceberg specification.

Protobuf normalization in Schema Registry

Redpanda now supports normalization of Protobuf schemas in the Schema Registry. You can normalize Avro, JSON, and Protobuf schemas both during registration and lookup. For more information, see the Schema Registry overview, and the Schema Registry API reference.

Protobuf well-known types in rpk

Support for Protobuf well-known types is available in rpk when encoding and decoding records using Schema Registry.

SASL/PLAIN authentication

You now can configure Kafka clients to authenticate using SASL/PLAIN with a single account using the same username and password. Unlike SASL/SCRAM, which uses a challenge response with hashed credentials, SASL/PLAIN transmits plaintext passwords. You enable SASL/PLAIN by appending PLAIN to the list of SASL mechanisms.

Pause and resume uploads

Redpanda now supports pausing and resuming uploads to object storage when running Tiered Storage, with no risk to data consistency or data loss. You can use the cloud_storage_enable_segment_uploads property to pause or resume uploads to help you troubleshoot any issues that occur in your cluster during uploads.

Metrics

The following metrics are new in this version:

Consumer lag gauges

Redpanda can now expose dedicated consumer lag gauges that eliminate the need to calculate lag manually. These metrics provide real-time insights into consumer group performance and help identify issues. The following metrics are available:

  • redpanda_kafka_consumer_group_lag_max: Reports the maximum lag observed among all partitions for a consumer group. This metric helps pinpoint the partition with the greatest delay, indicating potential performance or configuration issues.

  • redpanda_kafka_consumer_group_lag_sum: Aggregates the lag across all partitions, providing an overall view of data consumption delay for the consumer group.

See Monitor consumer group lag for more information.

Other metrics

Cluster properties

The following cluster properties are new in this version:

Metrics

Iceberg integration

Log compaction

Raft optimization

Tiered Storage

TLS configuration

Throughput quota

Topic configuration

Scheduler improvements

Changes to the default configuration

Client quota properties removed

The following client configuration properties were deprecated in version 24.2.1, and have been removed in this release:

  • kafka_client_group_byte_rate_quota

  • kafka_client_group_fetch_byte_rate_quota

  • target_quota_byte_rate

  • target_fetch_quota_byte_rate

  • kafka_admin_topic_api_rate

Use rpk cluster quotas to manage client throughput limits based on the Kafka API.

Broker properties

Topic properties

  • min.cleanable.dirty.ratio: Sets the minimum ratio between the number of bytes in dirty segments and the total number of bytes in closed segments that must be reached before a partition’s log is eligible for compaction in a compact topic.