Release Dates
- KIP Freeze: 20th November 2024 (Wednesday)
- A KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release. Note, any KIP that may not be implemented in a week, or that might destabilize the release, should be deferred.
- Feature Freeze: 11th December 2024 (Wednesday)
- major features merged & working on stabilisation, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in Jira
- Increased the time between the KIP Freeze and the Feature Freeze due to Thanksgiving.
- Code Freeze: 15th January 2025 (Wednesday)
- Increased the time between the Feature Freeze and the Code Freeze due to the holiday season.
- At least two weeks of stabilization will follow Code Freeze, meaning we expect to release no earlier than January 29th 2025.
These dates are goals and subject to change, but we expect to stay on the Time Based Release Plan unless unexpected critical issues come up. While the earliest possible release date is 2w after code freeze, release candidates (RCs) will roll out as needed until the release vote passes.
The release manager is David Jacot
How to Contribute
Before code freeze:
- Participate in votes and discussions to land or postpone the open KIPs.
- Review patches. We anticipate that this release, as it usually happens, will be bottlenecked mostly on reviews. The more reviewers, the more content we can fit in.
- Write unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka.
After code freeze:
- Write more unit/integration/system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka.
- Improve documentation.
- Test the release candidates.
- Open blocker JIRAs on critical issues found. Open non-blocker JIRAs on any other issues found.
- Fix critical bugs.
- Review bug fixes.
- Vote on release candidates. Even though only PMC votes are binding, community votes are super important as we evaluate the readiness of the release.
Open Issues
Also, feel free to refer to the 4.0.0 release page for more details of the included tickets (requires logging in to the Apache Kafka Jira project).
Planned KIP Content
Note: The planned content is not binding - the final content will be based on the features committed by the branch-cutting date.
See Kafka Improvement Proposals for the full list of KIPs.
If you do not see your KIP here and want to, please reply to the mailing list thread about the release!