Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: January 23, 2018 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: January 30, 2018 (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: February 13, 2018 (first RC created now)
• Release: March 28, 2018 (Tentatively)

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 Damian Guy.

Release Features

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

• Significant Controller improvements (much faster and session expiration edge cases fixed)
• Data balancing across log directories (JBOD)
• More efficient replication when the number of partitions is large
• Dynamic Broker Configs
• Delegation tokens (KIP-48)
• Kafka Streams API improvements (KIP-205 / 210 / 220 / 224 / 239)

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	Committer
KIP-86: Configurable SASL callback handlers		Broker	Rajini Sivaram
KIP-145 - Expose Record Headers in Kafka Connect		Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-149: Enabling key access in ValueTransformer, ValueMapper, and ValueJoiner		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-171 - Extend Consumer Group Reset Offset for Stream Application		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-203: Add toLowerCase support to sasl.kerberos.principal.to.local rule		Security	Jason Gustafson
KIP-204 : Adding records deletion operation to the new Admin Client API		Admin Client	guozhang Wang
KIP-205: Add all() and range() API to ReadOnlyWindowStore		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-208: Add SSL support to Kafka Connect REST interface		Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-210 - Provide for custom error handling when Kafka Streams fails to produce		Streams	Damian Guy
KIP-212: Enforce set of legal characters for connector names		Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-214: Add zookeeper.max.in.flight.requests config to the broker		Broker	Jiangjie Qin
KIP-215: Add topic regex support for Connect sinks		Connect	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-218: Make KafkaFuture.Function java 8 lambda compatible		Client	Ewen Cheslack-Postava
KIP-220: Add AdminClient into Kafka Streams' ClientSupplier		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-223 - Add per-topic min lead and per-partition lead metrics to KafkaConsumer		Client	Jun Rao
KIP-224: Add configuration parameter `retries` to Streams API		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-225 - Use tags for consumer “records.lag” metrics		Client	Jiangjie Qin
KIP-226 - Dynamic Broker Configuration		Broker	Rajini Sivaram
KIP-227 - Introduce Incremental FetchRequests to Increase Partition Scalability		Broker	Jun Rao
KIP-229: DeleteGroups API		Multiple	Jason Gustafson
KIP-233: Simplify StreamsBuilder#addGlobalStore		Streams	Matthias Sax
KIP-237: More Controller Health Metrics		Broker	Ismael Juma Juma
KIP-238: Expose Kafka cluster ID in Connect REST API		Connect	Jason Gustafson
KIP-239 Add queryableStoreName() to GlobalKTable		Streams	guozhang Wang
KIP-243: Make ProducerConfig and ConsumerConfig constructors public		Client	Matthias Sax
KIP-247: Add public test utils for Kafka Streams		Streams	guozhang Wang

Postponed to subsequent release

KIP	JIRA	Component	Committer
KIP-48: Delegation token support for Kafka		Broker
KIP-91 Provide Intuitive User Timeouts in The Producer		Clients
KIP-149: Enabling key access in ValueTransformer, ValueMapper, and ValueJoiner (only partially implemented in 1.1.0)		Streams	?
KIP-183 - Change PreferredReplicaLeaderElectionCommand to use AdminClient		Multiple	Ismael Juma Juma
KIP-150 - Kafka-Streams Cogroup		Streams	?
KIP-245: Use Properties instead of StreamsConfig in KafkaStreams constructor		Streams	?