Zeek 8.0, our next long-term support (LTS) release, is just a few weeks away! Time for a quick recap of what the development team has been up to lately, and a look at our planned release timeline.
The major features we planned for this release have landed at this point. We’ll say a lot more about these after the release, but extensible flow tuples, cluster backend improvements for WebSockets and ZeroMQ, improved cluster and storage telemetry, a Redis analyzer, a revamp of analyzer and DPD logging, and control-flow optimizations in Spicy’s code generator are merged. We’ve also upgraded our codebase to C++20, since the end-of-life of CentOS 7 and Debian 10 allowed us to do so in accordance with our platform support policy, and bumped our JavaScript support to Node 24.
We’re planning to create the 8.0 release branch and the first release candidate on August 4. If you have contributions you’d like to see in this release still, please open PRs soon. As usual, we’ll then allow a few weeks to polish documentation and test the release, and encourage everyone to send feedback. If all goes well, we’ll aim for a release of Zeek 8 on August 18.
As in every Zeek LTS cycle we’ll continue to maintain the past LTS series, 7.0.x, until the release of Zeek 8.1 in approximately 4 months.
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.