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• Send out an announcement email.
  • The announcement email should be sent to  announce@apache.org, users@kafka.apache.org, dev@kafka.apache.org, and kafka-clients@googlegroups.com
  • You need to use your apache email address to send out the email (otherwise, it won't be delivered to announce@apache.org).
    • If you use gmail, you can configure it to send outbound mail from your apache address. Go to Settings → Accounts and Import → Send mail as: , and use the config:
      Server: mail-relay.apache.org Port: 587 (STARTTLS), 465 (SSL) User/Pass: {Your LDAP credentials}
    • For other mail clients, see https://infra.apache.org/committer-email.html
  • You need to be subscribed to `kafka-clients@googlegroups.com` with your apache email address – otherwise it bounces back. Just send a message from your apache email to kafka-clients+subscribe@googlegroups.com and click `Join` in the confirmation email
  • Make sure to send the email as plain text, if there is any html (including basic hyperlinks) the email will bounce from announce@apache.org. For gmail, removing formatting might not be enough. Make sure you've selected the option "Plain text mode". 
  • Double check that all the links in the email and on the downloads page work.
  • Generate the release email:
    • Run  `./release.py release-email` script in the root of the kafka repository and follow the instructions to generate the announcement email template for the release to the mailing list.

    • Check and update the Scala versions, if necessary, in the release email.

• Once the release is announced, the PMC member who committed the release artifacts to the SVN dist repository should add the release data to https://reporter.apache.org/addrelease.html?kafka (they will get a notification asking them to do this after the svn commit).
• PMC member should double check if older releases should be archived (cf. http://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html#when-to-archive). This includes changing the relevant download links in the site's `download.html` to use the archive link.
  • Cf. 

    Jira
    server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-6222

     and 

    Jira
    server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-6223

• For feature releases, file a JIRA for updating compatibility/upgrade system tests to test the newly released version. Example PRs:
  • Broker and clients: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/12210
  • Streams: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/12209

For feature releases, publish the blog post previously shared with the dev list.

After release

After releasing the new version, we need to update the versions in the following files.

• gradle/dependencies.gradle
• tests/docker/Dockerfile
• vagrant/base.sh
• tests/kafkatest/version.py (patch releases only update the latest version)

Here are some example PRs that update these files

• https://github.com/apache/kafka/commit/354db26b954c1df7c8c83748c466768399209b8c
• https://github.com/apache/kafka/commit/353141ed9294f11098984d137a3c244997405472
  https://github.com/apache/kafka/commit/354c9ca0ce676a7c638da36e5174cf96a2b19533

It may also be worth tackling the compatibility/upgrade system tests as mentioned above.

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