An issue has been discovered with in the Strimzi RC1 build.  The root cause is a defect in new KIP-368 implementation within the latest release of Sarama 1.33.0 include in the Strimzi RC.    The defect is described by https://github.com/Shopify/sarama/issues/2233 and leads to the canary unexpectedly disconnecting from the kafka cluster and may also lead to unexpected out of memory problems being suffered by the kube pod hosting the canary.

There is already a PR open against Sarama with a proposed fix.  It is hoped if the fix is accepted and a new Sarama micro release made soon, the Strimzi Canary RC will be respun soon.