Chargeback, Topic Views, and ApplicationGroup delegation

Chargeback: see where your Kafka bill comes from

Chargeback is now at v1.0, refined from earlier releases based on customer feedback into an accounting view of Kafka spend. It is built to answer the question every platform lead eventually gets: which applications drive the cost, and which teams own them. Spend rolls up by application, service account, or any label, like team, department or business unit, so reports line up with how the business is structured rather than how the infrastructure is shaped.

The bigger shift in this release is that Chargeback no longer needs Gateway to give a complete picture. Confluent Cloud customers used to see storage costs only. Now Chargeback pulls ingress and egress directly from the Confluent Metrics API, joins them with Console's storage and partition data, and maps anonymous service account usage back to the applications, teams and people who actually own it. Learn about Chargeback →

Topic Views: filtered slices of a Kafka topic, without copying data (preview)

Topic Views give consumers a filtered, projected view of a Kafka topic without duplicating or modifying the underlying data. Define a view once, and downstream teams can subscribe to exactly the slice of data they need, without spinning up new pipelines or maintaining parallel topics.

The initial preview supports SQL filtering and projection on JSON records, with CEL and schema-aware formats coming next. Topic Views replace the SQL Topic Plugin and are the foundation for richer topic-level transformations going forward. Explore Topic Views →

One Gateway, many client populations (preview)

Gateway can now expose multiple listeners on a single instance, each with its own security protocol and network configuration. That means a permissive internal listener for in-cluster apps can sit alongside a strict external listener for partners or customers, all backed by the same Kafka clusters.

This release also extends multi-listener with per-listener mTLS, so client certificate requirements can be tightened on external traffic without disrupting internal services. Configure multiple listeners →

Delegate federated ownership to the right teams

Application owner groups previously held a fixed bundle of permissions. Console 1.45.0 unbundles those into individual permissions on ApplicationGroups, so platform teams can hand off specific responsibilities, like requesting access to topics, approving access requests, managing API keys or managing service accounts, to the people who should be doing them, and nothing more.

Existing access is preserved automatically on upgrade, so current users keep working without interruption while platform admins fine-tune access on their own timeline. Configure ApplicationGroup permissions →

For a full list of changes, read the complete release notes.

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