No official release for a very long time

[MantasN]

Hello,

It would be great if you can elaborate more about the future plans and release cadence, since last official release was done more than one and a half year ago (2019-10-31), but there were a lot of changes in master branch after that.

• Can I consider master branch as safe to use and stable even if there were no official release? If yes, why not to just simply release periodically?
• Is this component is still widely used in Zalando and will be supported by founding team in the near future?
• Is there any short-term future plans to introduce some new big features, performance optimisations, refactoring or it is in support mode right now?

Regards,

Mantas

[jojijohn]

Hello,

We are considering to use Nakadi for our Event Hub, but wanted to voice the same concerns raised by @MantasN.
Also, are the supported Kafka versions documented anywhere? I couldn't find any documentation around Nakadi -> Kafka version compatibility.

Joji

[adyach]

hello, thanks for the questions, I will shortly answer them:

Can I consider master branch as safe to use and stable even if there were no official release? If yes, why not to just simply release periodically?

The master branch is not considered stable 100%, because new features are merged to master for validation. it can happen that the master will be reverted.

Is this component is still widely used in Zalando and will be supported by founding team in the near future?

At the moment project is supported by founding team, but there is no commitment to the outer world about the future of the project.

Is there any short-term future plans to introduce some new big features, performance optimisations, refactoring or it is in support mode right now?

Unfortunately, the team does not publish the project plans and roadmap. I consider the project is not opensource, because exactly the reasons the team does not bring the current state and future to the community. And unfortunately, there is no plan to do it in the near future.

Also, are the supported Kafka versions documented anywhere? I couldn't find any documentation around Nakadi -> Kafka version compatibility.

As to my knowledge there is no specifics about Kafka Client which Nakadi relies upon (maybe except Kafka Admin tools and Kafka broker discovery) I would say starting from Kafka 2.x it should be safe to use, but I would verify it by changing kafka client version and running the tests.

[MantasN]

Hey @adyach ,

Thanks for clarifications. So, to sum up we can say that the project became closed source and there are no public roadmap or commitment for further support? If yes, maybe you can elaborate more why you have decided to switch to "closed source" - just curious.

@jojijohn I would not recommend to use Nakadi as event hub due to the lack of support, reliability, existing bugs, performance and memory issues, etc. I believe vanilla Kafka is a better choice and it does not bring any additional overhead.

[jojijohn]

@MantasN are you aware of any existing reliability, bugs, performance and memory issues? Or you saying those are potential side effects if the project is abandoned by the founding team?