Release Dates
- KIP Freeze: May 11, 2019 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
- Feature Freeze: May 17, 2019 (major features merged & working on stabilization, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in JIRA)
- Code Freeze: May 29, 2019
- Release: June 12, 2019 (target)
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 target release date is fixed at ~2w after code freeze, RCs will roll out as needed until the release vote passes.
The release manager is Colin McCabe
Release Features
This is a list of key features/improvements/bugfixes that we can include with release notes:
- There have been several improvements to the Kafka Connect REST API.
- Kafka Connect now supports incremental cooperative rebalancing.
- Kafka Streams now supports an in-memory session store and window store.
- The AdminClient now allows users to determine what operations they are authorized to perform on topics.
- There is a new broker start time metric.
- JMXTool can now connect to secured RMI ports.
- An incremental AlterConfigs API has been added. The old AlterConfigs API has been deprecated.
- We now track partitions which are under their min ISR count.
- Consumers can now opt-out of automatic topic creation, even when it is enabled on the broker.
- Kafka components can now use external configuration stores (KIP-421)
- Improved replica fetcher behavior when errors are encountered
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 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 RCs. 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 this release page for more details of the included tickets.
Planned KIP Content
See Kafka Improvement Proposals for the full list of KIPs.