This is the first release as an Apache top-level project and represents many months of hard work.

A few of the major improvements (from https://archive.apache.org/dist/kafka/0.8.0/RELEASE_NOTES.ht...):

  * Intra-cluster replication support
  * Support multiple data directories
  * Many new internal metrics
  * Time based log segment rollout

Plus many bug fixes and other improvements.