Updated October 25, 2026
· ~2 min read
Kafka 4.0 removed ZooKeeper entirely in favour of KRaft, and the managed options caught up through 2025 and 2026: Amazon MSK added Kafka 4.0 in May 2025, KRaft for Express brokers from Kafka 3.9, and in August 2026 in-place migration of existing clusters from ZooKeeper to KRaft. Express brokers, launched at the end of 2024, offer up to three times the throughput per broker, scale up to 20 times faster and recover 90% faster than standard brokers, according to AWS.
On Kubernetes, the Strimzi operator — a CNCF project — runs Kafka the same way on any cluster. And Confluent Cloud remains the full managed platform with its own ecosystem.
Kafka is the right tool for high-throughput event streams that several consumers read independently and replay. It is the wrong tool for a work queue between two services, a handful of events a second, or fan-out notifications — SQS, SNS and EventBridge do those for a fraction of the cost and with nothing to operate. A surprising number of Kafka clusters on AWS carry less traffic than a single SQS queue handles comfortably.
Question 1 of 2
Do several independent consumers need to read and replay a high-volume stream?
On AWS, use MSK — Express brokers for most new clusters, since they remove storage sizing and scale far faster — unless you need Confluent's ecosystem (managed connectors, stream processing, governance) badly enough to pay for it, in which case Confluent Cloud. Run Strimzi on EKS when Kafka must run the same way outside AWS, or when you already operate Kafka well and want full control of versions and configuration. If you are still on ZooKeeper-based MSK, plan the in-place KRaft migration now; Kafka 4.x does not have ZooKeeper at all.
AWS Architecture Review
A focused, senior-level review of your current AWS architecture, with a prioritized list of what to fix and why.
AWS Data Lakehouse Platform
A production data lakehouse on AWS (S3-backed data lake with Glue, Iceberg, Athena, and Redshift) structured for analytics, ML feature stores, and governed data sharing.
We work with startups and growing companies on AWS architecture decisions. Tell us about your situation and we will recommend the right approach.
As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.