Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: Sep 30, 2020 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: Oct 7, 2020 (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 21, 2020
• Released Dec 21, 2020

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 Bill Bejeck

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.

KIP	JIRA	Component
KIP-662: Throw Exception when Source Topics of a Streams App are Deleted		Kafka Streams
KIP-654: Aborted transaction with non-flushed data should throw a non-fatal exception		Kafka Clients
KIP-651 - Support PEM format for SSL certificates and private key		Core
KIP-648: Renaming getter method for Interactive Queries		Kafka Streams
KIP-632: Add DirectoryConfigProvider	,
KIP-626: Rename StreamsConfig config variable name		Kafka Streams
KIP-620 Deprecate ConsumerConfig#addDeserializerToConfig and ProducerConfig#addSerializerToConfig		Kafka Clients
KIP-617: Allow Kafka Streams State Stores to be iterated backwards		Kafka Streams
KIP-616: Rename implicit Serdes instances in kafka-streams-scala		Kafka Streams
KIP-613: Add end-to-end latency metrics to Streams		Kafka Streams
KIP-612: Ability to Limit Connection Creation Rate on Brokers		Core
KIP-607: Add Metrics to Kafka Streams to Report Properties of RocksDB		Kafka Streams
KIP-601: Configurable socket connection timeout in NetworkClient		Core
KIP-599: Throttle Create Topic, Create Partition and Delete Topic Operations		Core
KIP-597: MirrorMaker2 internal topics Formatters
KIP-584: Versioning scheme for features
KIP-572: Improve timeouts and retries in Kafka Streams		Kafka Streams
KIP-554: Add Broker-side SCRAM Config API		Core
KIP-545: support automated consumer offset sync across clusters in MM 2.0		Mirror Maker 2.0
KIP-497: Add inter-broker API to alter ISR		Core
KIP-478 - Strongly typed Processor API		Kafka Streams
KIP-450: Sliding Window Aggregations in the DSL		Kafka Streams
KIP-431: Support of printing additional ConsumerRecord fields in DefaultMessageFormatter		Kafka Tools

Postponed to subsequent release