Manikumar Reddy announces new features in Apache Kafka 2.4:
KIP-392: Allow consumers to fetch from closest replica
Historically, consumers were only allowed to fetch from leaders. In multi-datacenter deployments, this often means that consumers are forced to incur expensive cross-datacenter network costs in order to fetch from the leader. With KIP-392, Kafka now supports reading from follower replicas. This gives the broker the ability to redirect consumers to nearby replicas in order to save costs.
It’s not the biggest release of Kafka ever, but there are some really nice updates here.