The popularity of Kafka has put it at the center of event processing infrastructure, which is used by organizations of all sizes to stream messages and data. Kafka is often used as a technology that brings data into a database or a data lake, where additional processing and analytics occur. Optimizing performance for globally distributed Kafka deployments has long been a challenge, but the new features in Apache Kafka 4.2 could also help to further its popularity, with improved performance and lower latency.