Release Dates

• KIP Freeze: Sep 24, 2018 (a KIP must be accepted by this date in order to be considered for this release)
• Feature Freeze: Oct 1, 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: Oct 15, 2018
• Release: Nov 20, 2018

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 Dong Lin.

Release Features

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

• Java 11 support
• Support for Zstandard, which achieves compression comparable to gzip with higher compression and especially decompression speeds (KIP-110)
• Avoid expiring committed offsets for active consumer group (KIP-211)
• Provide Intuitive User Timeouts in The Producer (KIP-91)

• Kafka's replication protocol now supports improved fencing of zombies. Previously, under certain rare conditions, if a broker became partitioned from Zookeeper but not the rest of the cluster, then the logs of replicated partitions could diverge and cause data loss in the worst case (KIP-320).

• Streams API improvements (KIP-319, KIP-321, KIP-330, KIP-353, KIP-356)
• Admin script and admin client API improvements to simplify admin operation (KIP-231, KIP-308, KIP-322, KIP-324, KIP-338, KIP-340)
• DNS handling improvements (KIP-235, KIP-302)

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.

Postponed to subsequent release