Release Dates

• Feature Freeze: Jan 13, 2017 (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: Jan 27, 2017 (first RC created now)
• Release: Feb 14, 2017 ♥

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.

Release Manager

The release manager is Ewen Cheslack-Postava

Release Features

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

• Session windows in Kafka Streams (KIP-94)
• Improved compatibility for Java clients (compatible with older brokers in addition to brokers supporting older client versions, KIP-97)
• Dynamic JAAS configuration – multiple client auth per process, KIP-85
• More intuitive Kafka Streams join semantics (KIP-77)
• Avoid flushing pipeline in sink connectors (KIP-89)

How to Contribute

Before Jan 27:

• 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 system tests. We want to preserve the tradition of high-quality releases in Apache Kafka. 

After Jan 27:

• Test the release candidates
• Open bugs on important issues found
• Fix 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

Planned KIP Content

Note: The planned content is not binding - final content will be based the features committed by branch-cutting date.

KIP	JIRA	Status	Component	Committer
KIP-66: Single Message Transforms for Kafka Connect		Committed (with some minor follow up outstanding)	Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-77: Improve Kafka Streams Join Semantics		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-84: Support SASL SCRAM mechanisms		Committed	Common/Clients/Broker	Jun Rao
KIP-85: Dynamic JAAS configuration for Kafka clients		Committed	Clients	Ismael Juma Juma
KIP-88: OffsetFetch Protocol Update		Committed	Clients/Broker	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-89: Allow sink connectors to decouple flush and offset commit		Committed	Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-90 - Remove zkClient dependency from Streams		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-92 - Add per partition lag metrics to KafkaConsumer		Committed	Consumer	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-93: Improve invalid timestamp handling in Kafka Streams		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-94 Session Windows		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-96 - Add per partition metrics for in-sync and assigned replica count		Committed	Broker	Ismael Juma Juma
KIP-97: Improved Kafka Client RPC Compatibility Policy	(Refactoring) (Primary patch) (System test 1) (CLI tool) (System test 2) (Pre-KIP-74 compatibility) (Initial patch follow ups) (docs)	Committed	Clients	Ismael Juma Juma
KIP-99: Add Global Tables to Kafka Streams		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-100 - Relax Type constraints in Kafka Streams API		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-102 - Add close with timeout for consumers		Committed	Consumer	Jason Gustafson
KIP-103: Separation of Internal and External traffic		Main functionality committed. KAFKA-4636 & KAFKA-4637 pushed to subsequent release.	Broker	Jason Gustafson
KIP-104: Granular Sensors for Streams		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-105: Addition of Recording Level for Sensors		Committed	Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-108: Create Topic Policy		Committed	Broker	Jason Gustafson

KIPs Bumped to Next Release

KIP	JIRA	Status	Component	Committer
KIP-72: Allow putting a bound on memory consumed by Incoming requests		Patch Available	Broker	Ewen Cheslack-Postava