Kafka Streams 2.5.0 - Even Higher Availability & Interactive Queries

This post details the introduction and impact of KIP-535 (allowing state stores to serve stale reads during rebalance), KIP-562 (allowing fetching a key from a single partition), and KAFKA-9169 (fixing unnecessary restoration of standbys) in Kafka Streams 2.5.0. These improvements address challenges at Walmart scale by increasing availability during VM unavailability and rebalances, reducing query latency, and preventing unnecessary resource consumption.