Page History

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• KIP Freeze: Sep 24, 2018 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: Oct 1, 2018 (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: Oct 15, 2018 (Tentatively)
• Release: Oct 29, 2018 (Tentatively)TBD

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.

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This is a list of key features/improvements/bugfixes that we can include with release notes (WIP):

• Java 11 support
• Support for Zstandard, which achieves compression comparable to gzip with higher compression and especially decompression speeds (KIP-110)
• Avoid expiring committed offsets for active consumer group (KIP-211)
• Provide Intuitive User Timeouts in The Producer (KIP-91)

• Kafka's replication protocol now supports improved fencing of zombies. Previously, under certain rare conditions, if a broker became partitioned from Zookeeper but not the rest of the cluster, then the logs of replicated partitions could diverge and cause data loss in the worst case (KIP-320).

• Streams API improvements (KIP-319, KIP-321, KIP-330, KIP-353, KIP-356)
• Admin script and admin client API improvements to simplify admin operation (KIP-231, KIP-308, KIP-322, KIP-324, KIP-338, KIP-340)
• DNS handling improvements (KIP-235, KIP-302)

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