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.
The EU Data Act takes effect in September 2025, introducing major implications for teams running Kafka. This article explores what the Act means for data streaming engineers, and how Kpow can help ensure compliance — from user data access to audit logging and secure interoperability.
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!
This major version release from Factor House improves consumer offset management, Kafka Streams telemetry, extra data inspect capabilities and new Helm Charts!
KeyStrategy - how data written to internal topic should be keyedMetricFilter - specify which metrics should be sent to KpowHTTPS_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.
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.
With our new API, you can now leverage Kpow's capabilities directly from your own tools and platforms, opening up a whole new range of possibilities for integrating Kpow into your existing workflows. Whether you're managing topics, consumer groups, or monitoring Kafka clusters, our API provides a seamless experience that mirrors the functionality of our user interface.
Kpow can now auto restart connectors when they fail.
Read on to learn how to make connectors more reliable.
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.
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.
Release v92.3 introduces extensive UI accessibility improvements to Kpow and Flex along with new features, improvements, and bug fixes.
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.
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.
Kpow v91.5 brings improved UX for expanding and exploring tabular data, provides support for importing messages with headers for production, and fixes a few minor bugs.
Kpow Community Edition is a free, developer focused toolkit for Apache Kafka clusters, schema registries, and connect installations.
Starting today, individuals can use Kpow CE for free, even at work. Organisations can install Kpow CE in up to three non-production environments.
Each installation of Kpow CE can manage one Kafka Cluster, one Schema Registry, and one Connect cluster. See our feature matrix for more information.
Kpow v91.4 introduces ARM64 docker builds to support Graviton deployments and includes a range of general feature improvements.
Kpow v91.3 is a minor release that introduces new Schema and Connect features and resolves a number of small issues.
Kpow v91.2 is a minor release that introduces the new 'Resume Connector' bulk action
Kpow v91.1 introduces a new ksqlDB UI, new disk usage telemetry, and wildcard filtering.
Kpow v90.6 introduces our new Dark Mode UI, improved intellisense, and confiugrable persistence settings.
Kpow v90.5 fixed a regression in our Java 8 Build
Kpow v90.4 introduces a new Bulk Actions feature that allows you to take action on multiple resources in one click.
Kpow v90.3 features improved OpenID configuration and tenancy materialization performance improvements
Kpow v90.2 is a minor release featuring improved OpenID Connect SSO support.
OPENID_ISSUER configuration
Kpow v90.1 is packed with new Connect and Data Inspect features, provides a refreshed UI, and introduces Kpow Community Edition (CE).
Kpow v98.4 introduces a new CONNECT_INSPECT RBAC permission and fixes a number of minor UI bugs.
Kpow v89.3 introduces the ability to disable the log.cleaner.enable=true broker configuration check that Kpow requires for default installations.
Kpow v89.2 resolves minor issues with XML messages in Data Inspect and relay state when re-authenticating SAML sessions.
Kpow v89.1 is a major feature release that includes up to 20x improvement to Data Inspect speed, support for Confluent Managed Connect, support for Confluent Managed Connect, and support for MSK Serverless.
Kpow v88.7 resolves a minor issue introduced in Kafka 3.2.0
Kpow v88.6 brings Protobuf support for AWS Glue, easy configuration of JSON application logs, improved orphan schema detection, a JDK17 docker image, and improves integration with both Confluent Cloud and Confluent Schema Registry.
Kpow v88.5 brings improved integration with the Confluent Cloud Metrics API for large cloud clusters, and a number of minor improvements and bug fixes.
Kpow v88.4 brings nice new UI features including resizable columns and easy JSON export of tabular data. Performance and security improvements are also included.
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.
Kpow v88.1 is the first release to follow our new Major.Minor release model.
Kpow v88 features support for producing with message headers, protobuf referenced schemas, a new topic partition increase function, and much more.
Kpow v87 features support for AVRO Decimal Logical Type fields in both Data Inspect and Data Produce, improved Data Import UX for CSV message upload, and support for RHOSAK.
Kpow v86 features improved Kpow snapshot compute performance and an updated Schema UI that shows AWS Glue schema status.
Kpow v85 features improved Data Masking support and a new ConsumerOffsets serde in Data Inspect.
Kpow v84 features support for AWS Glue Schema Registry, AWS IAM MSK authentication, and improved Data Produce UX.
Kpow v83 features bulk message import, multi-message produce, improved kJQ filters, Github Teams RBAC integration, MSK IAM authentication, and more.
A quick UI update to skip user session immediately to previously selected tenant, where possible.
Kpow v81 is a major release containing Multi-Tenancy, Streaming Search, Confluent Metrics, and more.
Kpow v80 provides a brand new Kafka Streams UI with the GA release of the open-source Kpow Streams Agent.
Kpow v79 introduces Kpow Admin roles with the ability to Stage Mutations and create Temporary RBAC Policies, all wrapped up in a new Settings UI.
Kpow v78 provides a major overhaul of our user interface and the brand new ability to search multiple topics at the same time in Data Inspect.
This minor release provides improved support for Jetty User Authentication (PropertyFile, JDBC, LDAP) when operating Kpow behind a reverse-proxy.
Kpow v76 provides new Kafka ACL Management features and improves UI initialisation.
Version 75 provides support for Protobuf schema in the Schema Registry UI, and allows consumption and inspection of Protobuf in Data Inspect.
Kpow v74 comes packed with features including full support for Kafka ACL Management, JSON Schema support, and a raft of UI and performance improvements.
Version 73 provides support for PEM format SSL certificates introduced in Kafka 2.7.0 and described in KIP-651.
Version 72 of Kpow includes greater support for high availability Kafka resource management, new liveness probes, and greater support for reverse-proxying:
Version 70 of Kpow brings support for Azure Event Hubs, enables Multi-Tenant Confluent Cloud, introduces a new function to Klang, open sources our continuous delivery pipeline, and more..
Resolves a memory issue by reverting to a slightly older version of Jetty.
Resolves an issue that occasionally impacted compute/group views.
Discover the kREPL, an interactive development environment for Apache Kafka that provides all the tooling required to consume Kafka topics and explore structured data with Klang -- a language that blends JQ and Clojure.
This release brings all dependencies to current, ameliorating CVEs raised by our automated vulnerability scanning.
Kpow introduces the ability to apply kJQ queries to message headers, allowing you to search tens of thousands of messages a second and match by header.
Kpow corrects a labelling off-by-one error with horizontally displayed topologies.
Kpow provides a new environment variable to allow SSL connections to Kafka Connect where the SSL certificate is deliberately not validated.
Kpow, Compute Console, and Jetty User Authentication (LDAP, File, and DB) all come in v60 of our engineering toolkit for Apache Kafka®
Kpow provides a new environment variable to control the SAML session duration
Kpow supports SAML SSO when installed behind an HTTPS terminating Reverse Proxy
Kpow integrates more closely with Kafka Connect
Kpow provides blazingly fast KJQ filters for Kafka Topics
Kpow supports RBAC configurable role field and authenticated roles restrictions
Kpow supports custom serdes for KJQ, allowing you to search protobuf data on Kafka topics with JQ queries.
Kpow improves support for multiple concurrent users executing complex queries
Kpow provides inline reporting of serialisation and deserialisation errors in the results of Topic Inspect queries.
Kpow provides support for executing JQ-like queries on Kafka topics with KJQ.
Kpow provides masking and redaction of Topic Inspect results via configurable Data Policies and integrates the Audit Log with your Slack enabling you to more easily monitor user actions on Kafka resources.
A minor bugfix release resolving an issue with the datepicker in Topic Inspect
Kpow supports realtime monitoring of Apache Kafka with Live Mode
Kpow support user authz capabilities including Role Based Access Control (RBAC), SAML SSO including Azure AD and AWS SSO, and the ability to easily configure HTTPS out-of-the-box
This maintenance release improves the overall UI / UX of Kpow considerably.
Kpow provides the ability to manage and monitor Kafka Connectors
Kpow provides group state heatmaps and insights, with all metrics made available to Prometheus for egress
This is a performance and feature release to improve the ability of Kpow to snapshot resources.
Kpow now allows you to manage multiple Kafka clusters from a single installation
Kpow provides you the ability to view, edit, and understand Kafka topic and broker configuration
Kpow provides a suite of new and updated Kafka dashboards, giving you insights into brokers, topics, groups, members, assignments, offsets and much more
Kpow integrates with OpenID SSO providers including Github SSO and Okta
Kpow integrates with your Schema Registry, providing dashboards and allowing you to edit, update, delete, diff, and validate Schemas and Subjects
Quickly search for produces messages in a single click
Improved error reporting and performance
Support OKTA Authentication for Single Sign-On