Roadmap

RobustMQ Kafka already lets standard Kafka clients work end-to-end with fairly broad protocol coverage; at the same time a batch of behaviors keeps deepening (especially "enforcement of config / ACL / quota" and "transactions"). This page gives an honest picture of where things stand.

Done

Capability	Notes
Data plane	Produce / Fetch (long poll) / ListOffsets
Idempotent producer	Deduplicates, avoiding duplicate writes from retries
Consumer groups	Classic protocol + next-gen KIP-848 (server-side assignment) side by side
Topic management	Create / delete / add partitions
Config read/write	DescribeConfigs / AlterConfigs / IncrementalAlterConfigs (store + echo)
Authentication	SASL / SCRAM (SHA-256 / SHA-512)
ACL / quota	Metadata store/read (not yet enforced)
Delegation tokens	Create / renew / expire / describe
CLI compatibility	Official kafka-*.sh tools work
Cluster metadata	Metadata / DescribeCluster / DescribeTopicPartitions

In progress / Planned

Capability	Notes
Fetch compression	Compression encoding in Fetch responses
Incremental fetch session	Reduces full metadata transfer
leader_epoch semantics	More complete leader epoch fencing / validation
Config enforcement	Make stored topic config (e.g. retention.ms, cleanup.policy) actually drive engine behavior
ACL / quota enforcement	From "metadata only" to runtime enforcement
Transactions	Exactly-once transactional semantics
Share Group	KIP-932 shared consumption model
On-disk compression	Record compression in the storage layer

Reading "stored but not enforced"

Many of RobustMQ's control-plane capabilities follow a "metadata first" cadence: the API, persistence, and echo land first (clients read/write normally, CLIs display normally), and behavior enforcement follows. Therefore:

• Config: AlterConfigs writes and DescribeConfigs echoes the dynamic source correctly, but most keys are currently stored only and do not yet change engine behavior in full. See Topic Configuration.
• ACL / quota: rules can be stored/read, but runtime enforcement is still planned.

Related: System Architecture · Protocol Compatibility · Topic Configuration.