Hello Kafka users, developers and client-developers, This is the RC0 candidate for release of Apache Kafka 4.2.0.
This release has many exciting changes such as Kafka Queues being marked as production-ready, dead letter queues in Kafka Streams, a preview of the new Kafka Streams rebalance protocol, improved consistency across Kafka CLI arguments and metrics! I will raise a PR with a new blog post to the kafka-site repository in the next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread. Release notes for the 4.2.0 release: https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/RELEASE_NOTES.html *** Please download, test and vote by Wednesday, January 21, 10am UTC Kafka's KEYS file containing PGP keys we use to sign the release: https://kafka.apache.org/KEYS * Release artifacts to be voted upon (source and binary): https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/ * Docker release artifacts to be voted upon: apache/kafka:4.2.0-rc0 apache/kafka-native:4.2.0-rc0 * Maven artifacts to be voted upon: https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/staging/org/apache/kafka/ * Javadoc: https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/javadoc/index.html * Tag to be voted upon (off 4.2 branch) is the 4.2.0 tag: https://github.com/apache/kafka/releases/tag/4.2.0-rc0 * Documentation: I will raise a PR with the changes to the kafka-site repository in the next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread. * Protocol: I will raise a PR with the changes to the kafka-site repository in the next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread. * Successful CI builds for the 4.2 branch: Unit/integration tests: https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20953445348/job/60245258542 System tests: My environment needs to be recreated before I can share results from my end, so any results shared by voters would be greatly appreciated! * Successful Docker Image Github Actions Pipeline for 4.2 branch: Docker Build Test Pipeline (JVM): https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20962291986 Docker Build Test Pipeline (Native): https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20958037429 Note - when I run the quickstart against the JVM Docker image I need to specify the process.roles. I do not seem to need to specify the process.roles if I run the 4.1.1 image. I will run this once again tomorrow in another clean environment, but if somebody else can confirm/deny whether they can reproduce this beforehand this would also be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Christo
