We’re three months into the Zeek 7.2 development cycle, so now is a good time to share an update about ongoing development and our planned timeline for the Zeek’s next feature release.
We recently merged two of the biggies planned for this release: the new storage framework and WebSocket support native to Zeek. Both features continue our multi-release effort of reducing the Broker library to a “mere” topic-based pub/sub layer, enabling us to treat it as one of several available backend implementations. Our first alternative cluster backend, powered by ZeroMQ, has continued to mature in this release cycle and looks increasingly promising. Documentation and other items are still in flight, and you can track them in our 7.2 project board.
We’re planning to fork the 7.2 release branch and release the first release candidate, RC1, on April 18. If you’re currently working on contributions that you’d like to see in 7.2, we encourage you to submit pull requests soon to allow us time to review & iterate. Once RC1 is out, we encourage everyone to try it out and send feedback. Absent major hiccups, we’re planning to release 7.2 a bit over two weeks later, on May 8. We look forward to walking you through the new features of this release in more detail at that time. Release planning for Zeek 8, our next LTS release due in the summer, will happen shortly thereafter.
If you’re running Zeek clusters in production and would like to help us test our release candidates on a regular basis, we’d very much like to hear from you. While our test suites cover much of Zeek’s functionality, we always rely on Zeek users and the testing subgroup for the final go-ahead for a release. If you’d like to join our testing subgroup, please get in touch on Slack.
In our Zeek community call, on the first Wednesday of each month, we regularly report on feature development. We encourage you to join and ask questions! These calls are also available for later viewing on our YouTube channel.