Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: Jan 24, 2019 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: Jan 31, 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: Feb 15, 2019
• Release: Feb 28, 2019 (target); Mar 22, 2019 (actual)

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 Matthias Sax .

Release Features

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

• Added SSL support for custom principle name

• Allow SASL connections to periodically re-authenticate

• Improved consumer group management

  • default group.id is `null` instead of empty string
• Allow clients to suppress auto-topic-creation
• API improvement
  • Producer: introduce close(Duration)
  • AdminClient: introduce close(Duration)
  • Kafka Streams: new flatTransform() operator in Streams DSL
  • KafkaStreams (and other classed) now implement AutoClosable to support try-with-resource
  • New Serdes and default method implementations
  • Kafka Streams exposed internal client.id via ThreadMetadata
• Metric improvements:  All `-min`, `-avg` and `-max` metrics will now output `NaN` as default value

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

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.