Apache Kudu 1.18.0 Released

Posted 10 Jul 2025 by Abhishek Chennaka

The Apache Kudu team is happy to announce the release of Kudu 1.18.0!

The new release adds several new features and improvements, including the following:

  • Segmented LRU Block Cache (Experimental): Helps protect hot data from eviction during large scans.

  • Embedded RocksDB for Metadata (Experimental): A new option to store metadata in embedded RocksDB for better scalability.

  • Auto-Incrementing Columns Enhancements: These columns are now correctly restored on backup/restore and initialized on bootstrap.

  • Improved Metrics & Observability: Added metrics for timeouts, tablet scans, RPC backlogs, and more as well as Prometheus support for tablet-level metrics.

  • Build and Platform Updates: Kudu now supports AArch64 Ubuntu/RedHat, Ubuntu24.04 and builds on macOS Sonoma (Xcode 15).

  • Java & Python Client Improvements:
    • Python: simplified installation, UPSERT IGNORE, soft-deletes, immutable columns
    • Java: configurable buffer size, better schema update handling
  • Security Enhancements:
    • Improvements in JWT authentication
    • Dedicated SPNEGO keytab for embedded webserver
    • HTTP headers for enhanced security of the embedded webserver
  • Kudu CLI & Tooling Improvements: Better error messages and handling in kudu table copy, scan, and others.

The above is just a list of the highlights, for a more complete list of new features, improvements and fixes please refer to the release notes.

The Apache Kudu project only publishes source code releases. To build Kudu 1.18.0, follow these steps:

For your convenience, binary JAR files for the Kudu Java client library, Spark DataSource, and other Java integrations are published to the ASF Maven repository and are now available.

The Python client source is also available on PyPI.

Additionally, experimental Docker images are published to Docker Hub.