AWS Lambda Now Supports Queues for Apache Kafka in Self-Managed Kafka Event Sources
AWS, Monday, November 2nd, 2026
AWS Lambda adds queue support for self-managed Apache Kafka event sources, scaling consumption beyond a topic's partition count.
AWS Lambda now supports queues for Apache Kafka in self-managed Kafka event source mappings, covering customer-run clusters and managed offerings such as Confluent Cloud.
Built on Kafka share groups, generally available in Apache Kafka 4.2, it lets multiple event pollers consume concurrently from the same partition, each supporting up to 10 concurrent invocations.
This decouples parallelism from partition count without changes to producers, topic configuration or function code, and a slow or failed event no longer holds up others in its partition.
Queue mode does not preserve partition ordering and is meant for workloads such as video encoding, fraud detection and telemetry ingestion that do not need it.