One thing I immediately noticed after switching from sns/sqs to Kafka was how fast it is.

Messages seem to get sent/received almost immediately.

Apache Kafka 4.0 was just released. This is a major release which includes some significant improvements:

* Removal of Apache ZooKeeper as a dependency

* New consumer group protocol (KIP-848)

* Early access of Queues For Kafka (KIP-932)

Love Kafka