Record headers in Kafka Streams have always been second-class citizens: you could carry them through a topology but not store them in state. KIP-1271 and KIP-1285 fix that, which matters most for pipelines that encode routing, tracing, or schema metadata in headers and need that context to survive a windowed aggregation. The rest of the release rounds out operational control. Share group buffer tuning gives more levers for managing consumer lag under bursty loads, and log-directory cordoning lets operators fence off a broker disk for maintenance without rebalancing partitions mid-flight. The release drew 147 contributors across 25 KIPs and 600-plus commits.