The Release Candidate 1 for Strimzi Kafka Operators and for Strimzi Bridge are now available. There is a lot of new features (especially for the operators), so if you are interested in any of them feel free to test them and give us feedback.

The main changes in the operators include:
* Drop support for Kafka 2.1.0, 2.1.1, and 2.2.0

* Add support for Kafka 2.3.1
* Improved Kafka rolling update

* Improved Kafka Exporter Grafana dashboard
* Add sizeLimit option to ephemeral storage
* Add `schedulerName` to `podTemplate`
* Allow overriding the auto-detected Kubernetes version
* Garbage Collection (GC) logging disabled by default
* Providing PKCS12 truststore and password in the cluster and clients CA certificates Secrets
* Providing PKCS12 keystore and password in the TLS based KafkaUser related Secret

For more details and the upgrade procedure, go to: https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/releases/tag/0.15.0-rc1

The main changes in the Bridge include:

* Added support for Jaeger tracing
* Various bug fixes.

For more details, go to: https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-bridge/releases/tag/0.15.0-rc1

Thanks & Regards

Jakub