[VOTE] 2.8.0 RC0

Hello Kafka users, developers and client-developers,

This is the first candidate for release of Apache Kafka
2.8.0. This is a major release that includes many new
features, including:

* Early-access release of replacing Zookeeper with a self-
managed quorum
* Add Describe Cluster API
* Support mutual TLS authentication on SASL_SSL listeners
* Ergonomic improvements to Streams TopologyTestDriver
* Logger API improvement to respect the hierarchy
* Request/response trace logs are now JSON-formatted
* New API to add and remove Streams threads while running
* New REST API to expose Connect task configurations
* Fixed the TimeWindowDeserializer to be able to deserialize
keys outside of Streams (such as in the console consumer)
* Streams resilient improvement: new uncaught exception
handler
* Streams resilience improvement: automatically recover from
transient timeout exceptions



Release notes for the 2.8.0 release:
https://home.apache.org/~vvcephei/kafka-2.8.0-rc0/RELEASE_NOTES.html

*** Please download, test and vote by 6 April 2021 ***

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/~vvcephei/kafka-2.8.0-rc0/

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

* Javadoc:
https://home.apache.org/~vvcephei/kafka-2.8.0-rc0/javadoc/

* Tag to be voted upon (off 2.8 branch) is the 2.8.0 tag:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/releases/tag/2.8.0-rc0

* Documentation:
https://kafka.apache.org/28/documentation.html

* Protocol:
https://kafka.apache.org/28/protocol.html


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Thanks,
John