Why is MSK version not the latest one (3.6.0)

Dear customer,

I understood that you inquired about the recommended version of msk. If my understand is incorrect, please let me know that.

I would like to let you know that as per reference[1], as of now Kafka 3.5.1 is the recommended Kafka version. This recommendation to use version 3.5.1 is made by AWS based on analysis and algorithms which takes into account the feedback from the MSK customers and reported issues. As more customers adopt the newer versions, these algorithms will begin to favor them, and they will eventually be recommended.

In general, version “3.5.1” is recommended as this is the highest version available for provisioned storage. “3.6.0” is for tiered storage. Hence it entirely depends upon your use case if you wish to choose provisioned or tiered storage. Additionally you cannot rollback to the previous version if you have upgraded to a higher version already.

In conclusion, it is your preference for which Kafka version you want to use from the supported versions[1]. While later version do of course come with updated feature sets, we can not always guarantee the stability of these versions, and as such we do always recommended that a version that is heavily tested with your workload in a testing environment, before using it in production.

I hope this information has been helpful.

References: [1] Supported Apache Kafka versions https://docs.aws.amazon.com/msk/latest/developerguide/supported-kafka-versions.html