<p>Why does the strimzi kafka operator have supported kafka versions; why do I care about this, if the version of kafka is being managed by the operator?</p>
<p>Is this only mentioned for client support?</p>

<p>The Apache Kafka versions supported by the different Strimzi versions are listed on the <a href="https://strimzi.io/downloads/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Strimzi website</a>. Supported in this case means <em>the versions for which we ship container images and which were tested</em>. There are several reasons why we don't support more versions:</p>
<ul>
<li>While you might not <code>care about this, if the version of kafka is being managed by the operator</code>, the operator still cares because it needs to understand what it operates because it encodes the operational knowledge.</li>
<li>As any other software, also Apache Kafka evolves, APIs (for example around the Admin APIs) and configurations (e.g. new options are added in different versions and the operator needs to understand them to validate them or update them) are changing etc. So supporting old versions is not always easy without code complexity.</li>
<li>We have limited resources to build and test the software. Both in terms of contributors but also as CI resources to run the build and test pipelines.</li>
</ul>
<p>The current Strimzi commitment to what Kafka versions does it support is listed <a href="https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/blob/main/KAFKA_VERSION_SUPPORT.md" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. If you are interested, you can always join the project and help to make things better. Sicne Strimzi is open source, you can also always try to add another Kafka versions yourself and build and test it.</p>
<p>The Kafka consumers and producers have normally very good backwards / forwards compatibility. So you do not necessarily need to always use the same version of the clients as the brokers.</p>
