Confluent Cloud Q1 2026: Queues for Kafka, KCP for migration

This post announces the general availability of 'Queues for Kafka' on Confluent Cloud, introducing the 'share group' and 'share consumer' abstractions to enable elastic scaling beyond partition count for queue-like workloads. It also introduces KCP (Kafka Cloud Platform), an open-source CLI tool for automating migration from hosted Kafka to Confluent Cloud, covering discovery, provisioning, data migration, and client migration. New scalability features include maximum eCKU configuration for serverless clusters, increased eCKU scaling for Enterprise clusters (up to 32), client quotas for Enterprise and Freight clusters, and Fetch-from-Follower for Enterprise clusters. Confluent Intelligence is updated with multivariate anomaly detection for Flink.