Why is there a recommended version for MSK

We have a few guiding tenets around what versions we recommend. The first is only recommending bug fix releases as they will be more stable than major releases. We currently recommend 2.6.2, but we are also evaluating a revision of the recommended version. Second, we also track Kafka bugs in versions and based on the impact this will affect what version we recommend. We always recommend that customers run POC to test a Kafka version before moving to production.