• [EOL] Remove Rails 7.1 support according to EOL while not blocking Rails 7.1 usage.
• [Enhancement] Retry on the KIP-848 stale_member_epoch error.
• [Enhancement] Provide Karafka::Admin.trigger_rebalance API to programmatically trigger consumer group rebalances for operational purposes.
• [Enhancement] Nest pause configuration under config.pause.* namespace (config.pause.timeout, config.pause.max_timeout, config.pause.with_exponential_backoff) while maintaining backwards compatibility with the old flat API (config.pause_timeout, etc.) via delegation methods that will be removed in Karafka 2.6.
• [Enhancement] Detect and track involuntary assignment loss during long-running processing that exceeds max.poll.interval.ms via client.events_poll event and automatically update Karafka::App.assignments to reflect reality.
• [Enhancement] Extend Karafka::Admin.read_watermark_offsets to accept either a single topic with partition or a hash of multiple topics with partitions, using a single consumer instance for improved efficiency when querying multiple partitions.
• [Enhancement] Add configurable Karafka::ActiveJob::Deserializer to support custom serialization formats (Avro, Protobuf, etc.) for ActiveJob payloads.
• [Fix] Fix ActiveJob Continuation invalid class reference bug.