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Release Dates

KIP Freeze: 26th July 23 (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: 16th Aug (major features merged & working on stabilisation, minor features have PR, release branch cut; anything not in this state will be automatically moved to the next release in JIRA)
Code Freeze: 30th Aug 23
At least two weeks of stabilisation will follow Code 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 Satish Duggana

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.
- Ensure that release candidates include artifacts for the new Connect test-plugins module (see )

Open Issues

Also feel free to refer to the 3.6.0 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.

KIP	Component	Status
KIP-405: Kafka Tiered Storage	core	Majority is completed. Remaining to be done in 3.7.0
KIP-793: Allow sink connectors to be used with topic-mutating SMTs	connect	Completed
KIP-797: Accept duplicate listener on port for IPv4/IPv6	core	Completed
KIP-868 Metadata Transactions	core	Completed
KIP-875: First-class offsets support in Kafka Connect	connect	Completed In prior releases: connector STOPPED state, offsets read API In this release: Offsets alter and reset APIs
KIP-890: Transactions Server-Side Defense	core	Part 1 Completed
KIP-898: Modernize Connect plugin discovery	connect	Completed
KIP-902: Upgrade Zookeeper to 3.8.2	core	Completed
KIP-917: Additional custom metadata for remote log segment	core	Completed
KIP-923: Add A Grace Period to Stream Table Join	streams	KIP Accepted Implementation seems to be completed but yet to be confirmed by author.
KIP-925: Rack aware task assignment in Kafka Streams	streams	Partially implemented in 3.6
KIP-937: Improve Message Timestamp Validation	core	Completed
KIP-938: Add more metrics for measuring KRaft performance	core	KIP Accepted Majority is completed. Remaining to be done in 3.7.0
KIP-863: Reduce CompletedFetch#parseRecord() memory copy	clients	Completed
KIP-930: Rename ambiguous Tiered Storage Metrics	core	Completed
KIP-941: Range queries to accept null lower and upper bounds	streams	Completed

Postponed to subsequent release

KIP	Component	Status
KIP-580: Exponential Backoff for Kafka Clients	clients	Implemented Plan to release it in 3.7.0
KIP-726: Make the "cooperative-sticky, range" as the default assignor	clients	KIP Accepted Implementation not yet completed
KIP-770: Replace "buffered.records.per.partition" with "input.buffer.max.bytes"	streams	KIP Accepted Implementation in progress, not yet reviewed.
KIP-813: Shareable State Stores	streams	KIP Accepted Implementation not yet completed.
KIP-821: Connect Transforms support for nested structures	connect	KIP Accepted Implementation in progress
KIP-852: Optimize calculation of size for log in remote tier	core	KIP Accepted Partially completed
KIP-919: Allow AdminClient to Talk Directly with the KRaft Controller Quorum and add Controller Registration	core	KIP Accepted Not yet completed
KIP-925: Rack aware task assignment in Kafka Streams	streams	Partially implemented in 3.6
KIP-938: Add more metrics for measuring KRaft performance	core	KIP Accepted Majority is completed. Remaining to be done in 3.7.0
KIP-872: Add Serializer#serializeToByteBuffer() to reduce memory copying	clients	KIP Accepted Not yet completed
KIP-949: Add flag to enable the usage of topic separator in MM2 DefaultReplicationPolicy	mirrormaker	KIP Accepted Not yet completed for 3.6.0.