Release Candidate 1 of Strimzi Operators 0.18.0 is now available for testing. The main changes since the 0.17.0 release include:

* Add possibility to set Java System Properties via custom resources
* Make it possible to configure PodManagementPolicy for StatefulSets
* Update build system to use `yq` version 3 (https://github.com/mikefarah/yq)
* Add more metrics to Cluster, User and Topic Operators
* New Grafana dashboard for Operator monitoring
* Allow `ssl.cipher.suites`, `ssl.protocol` and `ssl.enabled.protocols` to be configurable for Kafka and the different components supported by Strimzi
* Add support for user configurable SecurityContext for each Strimzi container
* Add support for Kafka 2.4.1 and 2.5.0
* Remove TLS sidecars from ZooKeeper pods, using native ZooKeeper TLS support instead
* Use Strimzi Kafka Bridge 0.16.0 with support for CORS in the HTTP protocol
* Pass HTTP Proxy configuration from operator to operands

For more details and installation files, go to https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/releases/tag/0.18.0-rc1

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

Thanks & Regards

Jakub