Hello, We are currently on Pega 8.7.3 and we are planning to upgrade to 24.2. We understand that there has been externalization of 3rd party services like Kafka , Elasticsearch. Currently we don't have any use cases related to data streaming / real time data processing / Back ground processing using Queue Processors / Job schedulers /CDH using Kafka. Pega uses Kafka for internal queuing functionality !

Can we upgrade to 24.2 with out externalization of Kafka ?

Will Pega application stop working if we don't externalize Kafka or only features dependent on Kafka like the Queue Processor / Job scheduler stop working ?