📢 General release of Racecar v2!

[dasch]

Racecar v2 has now been released on Rubygems!

This release removes ruby-kafka as the underlying Kafka client library in favor of rdkafka-ruby, which itself is a set of Ruby bindings based on the librdkafka C library that is used by many other non-JVM client libraries such as confluent-kafka-python and confluent-kafka-go. I would like to especially thank @JHK for pulling this off – see #97 for more details on that.

The upgrade should be seamless, but due to the amount of underlying changes from v1 to v2 I do recommend testing out the upgrade in a staging environment. It is also important to ensure that, when upgrading, your previous consumer group deployments are shut down completely before the new version is started, since mixed v1 and v2 consumer groups are unlikely to work well. In any case, you should never use "rolling deployments" for consumer groups!

I hope this change will lessen the maintenance burden of keeping up with low-level changes and additions to the Kafka protocol, instead allowing Racecar (and hopefully soon DeliveryBoy) to focus on higher level concerns and turn-key functionality.

Enjoy!