The Release Candidate 1 for Strimzi Kafka Operators 0.16.0 is now available. There is a lot of new features, so if you are interested in any of them please test them and give us feedback.

The main changes since 0.15.0 include:

* Add support for Kafka 2.4.0 and upgrade from Zookeeper 3.4.x to 3.5.x
* Drop support for Kafka 2.2.1 and 2.3.0
* Add KafkaConnector resource and connector operator
* Let users choose which node address will be used as advertised host (ExternalDNS, ExternalIP, InternalDNS, InternalIP or Hostname)
* Add support for tini
* When not explicitly configured by the user in jvmOptions, -Xmx option is calculated from memory requests rather than from memory limits
* Expose JMX port on Kafka brokers via an internal service
* Add support for externalTrafficPolicy and loadBalancerSourceRanges properties on loadbalancer and nodeport type services
* Support for user quotas
* Possibility to specify custom server certificates to TLS based listeners
* Add support for Istio protocol selection in service port names
    * Note: Strimzi is essentially adding a tcp- prefix to the port names in Kafka services and headless services. (e.g clientstls -> tcp-clientstls)

Jakub