Amazon MSK Kafka Version End of Support: 3.6, 3.7 and the Move to 3.9 and KRaft

The short answer

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) ended support for Apache Kafka 3.6.0 on 1 June 2026 and for 3.7.x on 1 September 2026. Both dates have passed. The MSK documentation says a cluster on a Kafka version past its end of support date is auto-upgraded to the recommended version, which is currently 3.9.x. The upgrade can happen at any time after the date, and you will not be notified first.

Amazon MSK end of support dates

Amazon Web Services says it will provide extended support for 3.9 for a minimum of two years from its release date, so no earlier than April 2027. Version 3.9 is the last to support both ZooKeeper and KRaft. MSK also phases out creating new clusters on any version with a published end of support date.

Upgrade to 3.9, then migrate to KRaft

An upgrade you schedule beats one AWS schedules for you. Move each MSK cluster to 3.9.x through the normal version upgrade process, test your consumer groups and connectors, and then decide on KRaft.

MSK can migrate a ZooKeeper cluster to KRaft in place with the UpdateClusterKafkaVersion API and a target version of 3.9.x.kraft. The cluster stays available and no data moves, MSK provisions the KRaft controllers itself, but the operation can take several hours and cannot be reversed. Prerequisites include 3.9.x in ZooKeeper mode, three Availability Zones for Standard brokers, ZooKeeper client access disabled, no broker on kafka.t3.small and no dynamic advertised listeners. Kafka 4.x runs only in KRaft mode, so this step comes before any move to 4.x. On MSK, 4.2 is currently available on Express brokers only.

Other options

• A new MSK cluster. Amazon MSK Replicator can replicate topics, topic configurations, ACLs and consumer group offsets between clusters in the same or a different AWS Region, which suits a move to Express brokers.
• Self-managed Kafka. Some teams run 3.x themselves so the upgrade calendar is theirs, not the service's. That brings the infrastructure and its patching back in-house, which is where OSSeva's Kafka and ZooKeeper extended support fits.

Running Confluent too? See Confluent Platform 7.x end of support and moving off Confluent.

Frequently asked questions

Which Amazon MSK versions are currently supported?

3.8.x, 3.9.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x and 4.2.x. 3.9.x is the recommended version.

Why is ZooKeeper deprecated in Amazon MSK?

Apache Kafka removed ZooKeeper in 4.0, so MSK follows. 3.9 is the last version with ZooKeeper mode.