Changelog

The first Factor Platform release candidate is here, a major milestone toward a unified control plane for real-time data streaming technologies. This release also introduces Ververica Platform integration in Flex, plus support for Kafka Clients 4.1 / Confluent 8.0.0 and new kJQ operators for richer stream inspection.

Flex

• Integrations
  • Introduced integration with Ververica Platform (Community and Enterprise v2) for native Apache Flink® management and observability within the Factor House ecosystem.
• Bug Fixes
  • Flink clusters in the top-level menu and tenant selector now respect multi cluster configuration ordering.
  • Fixed incorrectly labeled sinks in Job's Inspect > Topology diagram.
  • Increased the timeout when submitting a job, which was incorrectly reporting a failure to start the job.

This release introduces a new unified documentation hub - Factor House Docs. It also introduces major data inspection enhancements, including comma-separated kJQ Projection expressions, in-browser search, and over 15 new kJQ transforms and functions. Further improvements include more reliable cluster monitoring with improved Under-Replicated Partition (URP) detection, support for KRaft improvements, the flexibility to configure custom serializers per-cluster, and a resolution for a key consumer group offset reset issue.

• Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed an issue where Flink SQL jobs were incorrectly applied when selected from the Jobs filter.
  • Fixed overflow of long job names in Jobs Overview tab's Job state chart.
  • Selected jobs now persist in the Jobs filter when navigating back and forth between the Overview and Details tabs.
• User Interface:
  • Improved sorting of jobs with identical names in the Jobs Details tab, with the most recent invocations appearing first.
  • Improved differentiation of jobs with identical names in the Jobs Inspect tab's filter by adding invocation start time to job labels.
  • Improved sorting of JARs with identical names in the Jobs JARs tab, with the most recently uploaded appearing first.

This minor release from Factor House introduces BYO AI model support, topic data inference, and major enhancements to data inspect—such as AI-powered filtering, new UI elements, and AVRO date formatting. It also adds integration with GCP Managed Kafka Schema Registry, improved webhook support, updated policy handling, and several UI and error-handling improvements.

• Make Dark mode the default theme
• Fix job heat-map tooltip saying "in a minute"
• Webhooks: add support for Microsoft Teams and generic HTTP
• Helm Charts:
  • Official, signed charts with verified publisher status and values schema validation!
  • Improve container security: explicitly set allowPrivilegeEscalation: false and enforce additional hardening through strict securityContext settings.

The real-time ecosystem has outgrown Kafka alone. At Current London 2025, the transition from Kafka Summit was more than a name change — it marked a shift toward streaming-first AI, system-level control, and production-ready Flink. Here's what Factor House saw and learned on the ground.

Introducing two new open sources Clojure UI libraries by Factor House.

HSX and RFX are drop-replacements for Reagent and Re-Frame, allowing us to migrate to React 19 while maintaining a familiar developer experience with Hiccup and similar data-driven event model.

This minor release from Factor House introduces support for GCP MSK and new feature improvements such as data inspect display options, AVRO Date Logical Type formatting, flat CSV export, and fixes a bug in consumer offset reset!

• Various UI + UX bugfixes
• Migrated to Tailwind 4.0
• Migrated to new HSX and RFX framework libraries - a snappier UI!

This major version release from Factor House improves consumer offset management, Kafka Streams telemetry, extra data inspect capabilities and new Helm Charts!

• Default to Java17 for releases
• Add Flex and Flex Community Helm Charts
• Accessibility: add decal options to all charts
• Add new configuration options for Strict-Transport-Security: HTTPS_STS_MAX_AGE and HTTPS_INCLUDE_SUBDOMAINS

With our funding announcement and the upcoming launch of the Factor Platform, we know some of our existing customers might be wondering: What does this mean for Kpow and Flex? Will we be forced to upgrade? Will prices spike?

Keep one thing in mind - at Factor House we're here for engineers.

We are thrilled to announce that Factor House has closed a $5M seed round to accelerate the commercial release of our new product, the Factor Platform.

Led by Blackbird Ventures, with OIF Ventures, Flying Fox Ventures, and LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund as partners, this round brings our five-year bootstrapping journey to a happy conclusion and points to a bright future ahead!

We first published a VPAT in the release notes of Kpow for Apache Kafka v92.4, with a VPAT available to download in every release of Kpow since.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are extending that commitment to all future Factor House product releases - including Flex for Apache Flink and the Factor Platform.

This minor version release from Factor House improves protobuf rendering, sharpens light-mode, simplifies community edition setup, resolves a number of small bugs, and bumps Kafka client dependencies to v3.7.0.

• Introduce ability to download topology visualisation as an image
• Improve light mode - better contrast between elements

Introducing full support for schema references in Confluent Schema Registry.

With this new release you can now create and edit AVRO, JSONSchema, and Protobuf schema with references, as well as consume and produce messages with those schema.

• Improve responsive UI for smaller resolution screens
• Improve OpenID Connect role claim ingestion
• Improve flink topologies vizualisation

Kpow can now auto restart connectors when they fail.

Read on to learn how to make connectors more reliable.

• Allow RBAC wildcards at both start and end of resource, such as *foo*

Kpow now offers a secure, vendor-agnostic OpenAPI 3.1 REST API for managing Kafka, Kafka Connect, and Schema Registry resources.

Read on to learn how to integrate Kpow with your product or GitOps pipeline using Kpow's new REST API modules.

• Introduce new PRESENTATION_MODE configuration to control UI visibility

Our mission at Factor House is to empower every engineer in the streaming tech space with superb tooling.

We are pleased to report that Kpow for Apache Kafka is now compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines and has an independently audited Voluntary Product Accessiblity Template (VPAT) report.

• Introduce WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, closing 100+ externally audited UI tickets
• Improve heatmap contrast colours
• Fix Weak SSL/TLS Key Exchange security advisory
• Fix Jetty authentication page visibility bug

Release v92.3 introduces extensive UI accessibility improvements to Kpow and Flex along with new features, improvements, and bug fixes.

• Introduce accessibility improvements throughout the Flex UI
• Improve Github OAuth2 org->role mapping resilience

Release v92.2 introduces new UI for Kafka Quotas, Transactional Producers, and KRaft clusters along with new features for topic and consumer management and improvements to Flink checkpointing and watermarking in Flex.

• Improve responsiveness of checkpoint/savepoint mutations
• Improve timestamp formatting of watermarks and backpressure

• Introduce RBAC_EVALUATION_MODE for permissive STAGE/DENY evaluation
• Improve error message of concurrent bulk-action error
• Improve table action menu, group item as 'Mutations' or 'Explore'
• Fix regression in table preferences persistence

Today we introduce Flex for Apache Flink and announce Factor Platform, the future of distributed systems engineering.

Starting now, individuals can use Flex CE for free, even at work. Organisations can install Flex CE in up to three non-production environments.

Kpow v92.1 closes a large number of support tickets, introduces new features like multi-topic create and time-since URP, and improves the efficieny of Kafka Connect and Schema Registry observation.

• Flex for Apache Flink deployed to Dockerhub

Kpow v88.2 introduces improved support for monitoring Flink consumers, the ability to encrypt your Kpow configuration to avoid passwords in plaintext, new configuration options for connecting to Confluent Schema Registries that require mutual TLS for authentication, and more.

• Introduced Simple Consumer (Flink) UI