AWS Lambda adds Kafka queue mode to scale beyond partition counts

AWS says Lambda now supports queue processing for self-managed Kafka event sources, allowing processing to scale beyond a topic's partition count. The capability covers customer-operated clusters and managed offerings such as Confluent Cloud. The mode uses Kafka share groups to let multiple event pollers consume from the same partition, with each poller supporting up to 10 concurrent invocations. It requires no changes to producers, topic configuration or function code, and a slow or failed event no longer holds up other events in its partition. Queue mode requires a cluster with share groups enabled, such as Apache Kafka 4.2 or later. It does not preserve partition ordering and is intended for workloads that do not require it.