Post-Quantum Cryptography in Confluent Cloud

This post announces the General Availability (GA) of 'Queues for Kafka' on Confluent Cloud and Confluent Platform, coinciding with the Apache Kafka 4.2 release. It introduces the share consumer API and share groups, allowing multiple consumers to cooperatively process messages from the same topic regardless of partition count. It also enables per-message acknowledgment, release, rejection, and renewal. The underlying mechanism is KIP-932, which uses time-limited locks on individual records managed by the broker. Code examples demonstrate both implicit and explicit acknowledgment modes. Confluent Cloud offers a fully managed experience with a dedicated UI and CLI, while Confluent Platform integrates with Control Center and Ansible/Kubernetes deployments. The post clarifies when to use the share consumer API (operational/application workloads) versus the traditional Consumer API (analytical/integration workloads).