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

I tested out the RC3 image, all seems good for our use-cases.

Thanks, I confirm that I tested the strimzi canary RC1 image. The changes seem good to me.

I gave the RC1 a spin today and encountered no issues. I was focused on the cluster operator. I tested upgraded from Kafka 3.2.3 -> Kafka 3.3.1, and the transitions between Strimzi PodSets/Statefulset

I gave RC1 a spin in my test environment, all looks good. Thanks Paolo.