[VOTE] 2.7.0 RC3

This is the fourth candidate for the release of Apache Kafka 2.7.0.

This is a major release that includes many new features, including:

* Configurable TCP connection timeout and improve the initial metadata fetch
* Enforce broker-wide and per-listener connection creation rate (KIP-612,
part 1)
* Throttle Create Topic, Create Partition and Delete Topic Operations
* Add TRACE-level end-to-end latency metrics to Streams
* Add Broker-side SCRAM Config API
* Support PEM format for SSL certificates and private key
* Add RocksDB Memory Consumption to RocksDB Metrics
* Add Sliding-Window support for Aggregations

This release also includes a few other features, 53 improvements, and 84
bug fixes.

Release notes for the 2.7.0 release:
https://home.apache.org/~bbejeck/kafka-2.7.0-rc3/RELEASE_NOTES.html

*** Please download, test and vote by Wednesday, December 2, 12PM ET

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/~bbejeck/kafka-2.7.0-rc3/

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

* Javadoc:
https://home.apache.org/~bbejeck/kafka-2.7.0-rc3/javadoc/

* Tag to be voted upon (off 2.7 branch) is the 2.7.0 tag:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/releases/tag/2.7.0-rc3

* Documentation:
https://kafka.apache.org/27/documentation.html

* Protocol:
https://kafka.apache.org/27/protocol.html

* Successful Jenkins builds for the 2.7 branch:
Unit/integration tests: (link to follow)
System tests: (link to follow)

Thanks,
Bill