Page History

Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: 09 Jun 2021 (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 (new date): 16 30 Jun 2021 (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 (new date): 30 Jun 14 Jul 2021
• At least two weeks of stabilization will follow code freezeCode Freeze.

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 Konstantine Karantasis

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

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Also feel free to refer to this release page for more details of the included tickets (requires log in to the Apache Kafka Jira project).

Planned KIP Content

Note: The planned content is not binding - final content will be based the features committed by branch-cutting date. See Kafka Improvement Proposals for the full list of KIPs.

Postponed to subsequent release

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KIP	JIRA	Component
KIP-726: Make the "cooperative-sticky, range" as the default assignor	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-12473	Clients
KIP-708: Rack awareness for Kafka Streams	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-6718	Streams
KIP-698: Add Explicit User Initialization of Broker-side State to Kafka Streams	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-10357	Streams
KIP-691: Enhance Transactional Producer Exception Handling	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-10733	Clients
KIP-653: Upgrade log4j to log4j2	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-9366	Applies to almost all the components
KIP-405: Kafka Tiered Storage	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-7739	Core
KIP-390: Support Compression Level	Jira server ASF JIRA serverId 5aa69414-a9e9-3523-82ec-879b028fb15b key KAFKA-7632	Clients