Release Candidate 1 of Strimzi Operators 0.19.0 is now available for testing with a lot of changes and improvements. The main changes since the 0.18.0 release include:

* Add support for authorization using Open Policy Agent
* Add support for scale subresource to make scaling of following resources easier:
    * KafkaConnect
    * KafkaConnectS2I
    * KafkaBridge
    * KafkaMirrorMaker
    * KafkaMirrorMaker2
    * KafkaConnector
* Remove deprecated `Kafka.spec.topicOperator` classes and deployment logic
* Use Java 11 as the Java runtime
* Removed the need to manually create Cruise Control metrics topics if topic auto creation is disabled.
* Migration to Helm 3
* Refactored the format of the `KafkaRebalance` resource's status. The state of the rebalance is now displayed in the associated `Condition`'s `type` field rather than the `status` field. This was done so that the information would display correctly in various Kubernetes tools.
* Added performance tuning options to the `KafkaRebalance` CR and the ability to define a regular expression that will exclude matching topics from a rebalance optimization proposal.
* Use Strimzi Kafka Bridge 0.18.0
* Make it possible to configure labels and annotations for secrets created by the User Operator
* Strimzi Kafka Bridge metrics integration:
    * Enable/disable metrics in the KafkaBridge custom resource
    * New Grafana dashboard for the bridge metrics
* Support dynamically changeable logging in the Entity Operator and Kafka Bridge 

There are also some deprecations and removals which you should be aware of:

* Deprecation of Helm v2 chart

* Removal deprecated cadvisor metric labels

* Deprecation of monitoring port on Kafka and ZooKeeper related services

In the next version, we will also remove the support for the v1alpha1 resources deprecated in Strimzi 0.12.0.

For more details and installation files, go to https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/releases/tag/0.19.0-rc1

Any feedback can be provided here, on the #strimzi Slack channel on CNCF Slack or as a GitHub issue.

Thanks & Regards

Jakub