Apache Kudu Blog

Apache Kudu 1.18.1 Released

Posted 09 Jan 2026 by Abhishek Chennaka

The Apache Kudu team is happy to announce the release of Kudu 1.18.1!

This maintenance release fixes critical bugs and packaging issues discovered in Apache Kudu 1.18.0. Users of Kudu 1.18.0 are encouraged to upgrade to 1.18.1 as soon as possible.

This release includes the following incremental updates since Apache Kudu 1.18.0:

  • Improved Java and Spark ecosystem reliability through fixes to dependency publishing, Spark class packaging, and data source discovery.

  • Enhanced TLS support for the embedded webserver, including configurable minimum TLS versions up to TLS 1.3 and control over TLSv1.3 cipher suites.

  • Upgraded Apache Spark support to Spark 3.5.

  • Increased stability of the CLI tools and the C++ client library, fixing crash in the kudu CLI binary upon exiting and crash in the C++ client library with verbose logging enabled. The latter was a regression introduced in the 1.18.0 release.

  • Improved compatibility with newer system libraries, including OpenSSL 3.4+ and platforms with 64KB memory pages.

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 1.18.1, 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.

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