[VOTE] 2.5.0 RC0

Hello Kafka users, developers and client-developers,

This is the first candidate for release of Apache Kafka 2.5.0.

This is a major release of Kafka which includes many new features,
improvements, and bug fixes including:

* TLS 1.3 support (1.2 is now the default)
* Co-groups for Kafka Streams
* Incremental rebalance for Kafka Consumer
* New metrics for better operational insight
* Upgrade Zookeeper to 3.5.7
* Deprecate support for Scala 2.11

The full release notes for 2.5.0 can be found here:
https://home.apache.org/~davidarthur/kafka-2.5.0-rc0/RELEASE_NOTES.html

*** Please download, test and vote by Thursday, March 5th, 5pm PT

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://home.apache.org/~davidarthur/kafka-2.5.0-rc0/

* Maven artifacts to be voted upon:
https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/staging/org/apache/kafka/

* Javadoc:
https://home.apache.org/~davidarthur/kafka-2.5.0-rc0/javadoc/

* Tag to be voted upon (off 2.5 branch) is the 2.5.0 tag:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/releases/tag/2.5.0-rc0

* Documentation:
https://kafka.apache.org/25/documentation.html

* Protocol:
https://kafka.apache.org/25/protocol.html

* Links to successful Jenkins builds for the 2.5 branch to follow

Thanks,
David Arthur