What’s New in Hazelcast Platform

Here are the highlights of what’s new and improved in Hazelcast Platform 5.7, including Management Center 5.11 and Platform Operator for Kubernetes 5.17 updates.

Hazelcast Platform 5.7 strengthens the operational foundations that mission-critical systems rely on when real-time data has to be both fast and correct. The release advances the Jet streaming engine and the CP Subsystem, adds support for Java 25, brings dynamic diagnostic logging to general availability in Management Center 5.11, and extends Kubernetes-native operations through Platform Operator 5.17.

Production-hardened streaming microservices

A growing number of Hazelcast customers are replacing sprawls of request-response microservices and separate data grids with chains of isolated, stateful Jet jobs running on a single cluster. Platform 5.7 makes that pattern operationally resilient at enterprise scale, with four specific improvements to the Jet streaming engine:

  • User Code Namespaces give each pipeline stage classloader isolation. Different stages can use different library versions, and any one stage can be hot-swapped without disturbing the others.

  • Stage-to-stage handoff through MapJournal and IMap now exposes first-class backpressure metrics and explicit signals when events are at risk of being overwritten. Inter-stage event loss becomes visible rather than silent.

  • Per-processor state counts are exposed, so operators can see memory pressure building before it causes a failure.

  • Automatic job recovery through routine cluster changes, including member replacement and rolling upgrades, removes manual operator intervention. Jobs configured with processing guarantees can be stopped, upgraded and resumed without data loss.

Together, these changes mean a failure in one stage does not cascade into the others. Each stage can fail, restart, or be upgraded independently, giving teams the isolation of microservices with the operational surface of a single platform.

For more information, see Building Data Pipelines and User Code Namespaces.

CP Leader Auto Step-Down

Enterprise

In a distributed cluster, every strongly consistent operation pays the cost of wherever the cluster has placed its CP leader. A leader in the wrong data centre means every transaction across every service pays that latency tax.

CP Leader Auto Step-Down in Platform 5.7 lets operators declare that specific members must never hold CP group leadership. Any such member elected as leader immediately triggers a new election, keeping leadership close to the workloads it serves. The feature is implemented without modifying the Raft protocol itself: leadership changes flow through the standard consensus mechanism, which preserves the CP Subsystem’s linearizable guarantees and no-data-loss property throughout.

The CP member list in Management Center 5.11 clearly identifies flagged members, so operators can see at a glance which members are excluded from leadership.

CP Leader Auto Step-Down requires the ADVANCED_CP feature to be enabled in the license key.

For more information, see CP Subsystem.

Java 25 support

Platform 5.7 adds support for Java 25, the latest Java LTS release, with no regressions against the prior LTS baseline across Oracle JDK, OpenJDK and the other JVM vendors Hazelcast supports. Benchmarks show no performance degradation, and in some workloads a measurable improvement. Management Center 5.11 is validated for Java 25 as well. The previously supported Java versions 17 and 21 continue to work with Platform 5.7, so adopting this release does not force a JVM upgrade.

When running Hazelcast on Java 25, the SecurityManager is not functional due to ecosystem changes in the JDK.
Docker users who want to run Hazelcast on Java 21 instead of the default Java 25 must pull a JDK-tagged image. For example, hazelcast/hazelcast:latest-jdk21 will resolve to 5.7 built with JDK 21.

.NET and C++ client performance

The Hazelcast .NET and C++ clients deliver significant performance improvements in 5.7. For detailed benchmark comparisons, see the client release notes.

Hazelcast Platform Release Notes

For detailed release notes for Enterprise Edition and Community Edition that include new features and enhancements, breaking changes, deprecations and other fixes, see Release Notes.

To evaluate Hazelcast Enterprise Edition features, you can request a trial license key.

Management Center 5.11

Management Center 5.11 focuses on operational reliability, cloud-native deployment support, and security hardening:

  • Dynamic diagnostic logging is now generally available. Operators can enable, configure and disable diagnostics at runtime, on any member, without a cluster restart - removing what used to be one of the most painful steps in diagnosing live production issues.

  • CP Leader Auto Step-Down is visible in the CP member list, so operators can see which members are excluded from leadership.

  • Automatic reconnection when a cluster comes back online removes the manual step previously required after planned or unplanned restarts.

  • JVM version details are exposed in the Members table, making mixed-version deployments and Java rollout verification straightforward.

  • Idempotent mc-conf security commands support GitOps patterns where the same configuration script is applied repeatedly.

  • Additional Near Cache invalidation metrics are exposed through the Prometheus exporter.

  • Security hardening: an authorization-bypass issue found during penetration testing has been resolved, the MC server version can be suppressed from HTTP response headers, and routine dependency security updates have been applied.

For more information, see the Management Center 5.11 Release Notes.

Hazelcast Platform Operator for Kubernetes 5.17

Operator 5.17 extends CRD coverage and closes several gaps in Kubernetes-managed deployments.

Configuration surface improvements:

  • Custom log4j2 configuration can now be supplied via the Hazelcast CR, bringing Operator-managed deployments in line with the logging customization available in standalone installations.

  • The Management Center Prometheus exporter is now configurable through the Operator rather than requiring separate MC configuration.

  • envFrom is supported, allowing environment variables to be injected from ConfigMaps or Secrets using the standard Kubernetes pattern.

  • Near Cache serialize-keys is now exposed in the CRD.

Deployment pattern improvements:

  • Additional JARs can be deployed via the sidecar agent, extending the module deployment capability introduced in 5.16.

  • Kubernetes labels on Operator-managed resources can now be modified after initial deployment.

  • Management Center instance names are now namespace-qualified, which matters in multi-namespace deployments.

Operator 5.17 fixes a TLS certificate rotation issue that has been present since Operator 5.15, where clients continued to connect with expired or invalid certificates after rotation. Customers running TLS on Operator 5.15 or 5.16 should prioritize this upgrade. In addition, configuration changes that should have triggered rolling updates but were silently ignored in earlier versions will now be applied correctly, so any pending changes will be applied on upgrade.
The Hazelcast Platform Operator defaults to Java 25 unless the deployment is pinned to a specific Java version.

For more information, see the Operator 5.17 Release Notes.

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