What Apache Kafka 4.4.0 brings to Kafka Streams: opt-in transactional state stores (KIP-892), headers in the partitioner and IQv2, the GlobalKTable joiner fix, and static membership and plugins for the Streams Rebalance Protocol — plus where StoatFlow stands.
StoatFlow 1.0.0-rc.1 is cut and the feature set is frozen — what separates the candidate from GA is proof, not features. The twelve weeks from the first alpha: 26 releases, 1,086 commits, a compatibility matrix grown from 417 to 619 tracked entries, three full-codebase review rounds — and the framework integration that kept us honest.
The StoatFlow documentation is now published as llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and raw markdown — the retrieval-side complement to the AI Assistant Skills pack. Nothing to install.
A free, open skills pack that makes AI coding assistants write correct StoatFlow instead of hallucinated Kafka Streams.
StoatFlow recovery has always been fast restart — but restart time scales with state. Hot standby is an opt-in active/passive pair that fails over in seconds regardless of state size, with exactly-once preserved across the handoff. Redundancy, not scale-out.
The first alpha is here. Kafka Streams DSL on a single-replica runtime with virtual-thread parallelism — measurably less CPU, memory, and latency on the same hardware.
