Kafka 最初是由 LinkedIn 开发，并于 2011 年初开源。2012 年10 月从 Apache Incubator 毕业。2014 年，Kafka 项目的几位 creator 创立了 Confluent 公司。
Confluent 联合创始人兼 CTO Neha Narkhede 撰文介绍了 Apache Kafka 1.0 发布的消息。
Kafka 最初被设计为一款高度可伸缩的消息系统；而今，它已成为一个全特性的分布式流处理平台，支持流数据的发布订阅、存储和处理。目前有大量公司将 Apache Kafka 用到了关键业务中。
Neha Narkhede 总结了 Kafka 一路走来加入的一些核心功能。
While being adopted at those companies for mission-critical applications, Kafka has also matured at a steady pace, adding first replication and the ability to store keyed data indefinitely, then the Connect API for integrating Kafka easily with systems like MySQL and Elasticsearch, then the Streams API to enable native stream processing in Kafka for mission-critical real-time applications and event-driven microservices, and then this spring, exactly-once processing semantics.
1.0 版本提供了很多新特性，比如更完善的 Streams API，更多运维指标，支持 Java 9，提高对硬盘故障的容忍度等。
新特性
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[KAFKA-4602] - KIP-72 Allow putting a bound on memory consumed by Incoming requests
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[KAFKA-4819] - Expose states of active tasks to public API
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[KAFKA-5341] - Add UnderMinIsrPartitionCount and per-partition UnderMinIsr metrics
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[KAFKA-5651] - KIP-182: Reduce Streams DSL overloads and allow easier use of custom storage engines
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[KAFKA-5694] - Add ChangeReplicaDirRequest and DescribeReplicaDirRequest (KIP-113)
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[KAFKA-5738] - Add cumulative count attribute for all Kafka rate metrics
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[KAFKA-5746] - Add new metrics to support health checks
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[KAFKA-5854] - Handle SASL authentication failures as non-retriable exceptions in clients
改进
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[KAFKA-1595] - Remove deprecated and slower scala JSON parser
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[KAFKA-2376] - Add Kafka Connect metrics
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[KAFKA-3741] - Allow setting of default topic configs via StreamsConfig
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[KAFKA-4108] - Improve DumpLogSegments offsets-decoder output format
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[KAFKA-4260] - Improve documentation of configuration listeners=PLAINTEXT://0.0.0.0:9092
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[KAFKA-4322] - StateRestoreCallback begin and end indication
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[KAFKA-4380] - Update the usage description of clean shutdown file.
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[KAFKA-4416] - Add a '--group' option to the console consumer
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[KAFKA-4501] - Support Java 9
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……
详细特性，见发布说明：https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/kafka/1.0.0/RELEASE_NOTES.html 。
下载：https://kafka.apache.org/downloads 。
