Introducing Confluent Platform 8.2: Queues for Kafka & Flink SQL

Confluent Platform 8.2, built on Apache Kafka 4.2, introduces several major capabilities. Queues for Kafka is now generally available, bringing native queue semantics—elastic consumer scaling, per-message acknowledgment, and task-level processing controls—directly to Kafka without additional systems. Flink SQL also reaches GA, enabling declarative stream management via DDLs, shared compute pools, and multi-Kubernetes cluster support. Confluent Private Cloud Gateway 1.2 adds intelligent client fencing/unfencing for migrations, SCRAM auth swapping, and expanded non-Java client support (Python, Go, .NET). Additional updates include Control Center 2.5 with new UIs for queues and Flink SQL, Confluent for Kubernetes 3.2.0, Confluent Ansible 8.2.0 with RHEL 10 and FIPS 140-3 support, and the deprecation of Confluent Health+ in favor of Unified Stream Manager for fleet-wide monitoring.