# Kong 1.3.0rc2 available for testing! **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Created:** [August 16, 2019, 5:50pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-3-0rc2-available-for-testing/4250 "2019-08-16T17:50:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![hisham](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/hisham/32/14_2.png) [@hisham](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/hisham)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2019, 5:50pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-3-0rc2-available-for-testing/4250/1 "2019-08-16T17:50:49Z")
Hello, Kong Nation! Weโ€™re happy to share with you the second release candidate for our next release, **Kong 1.3.0rc2**! This is the next step leading us to **Kong 1.3: the first release to officially support gRPC proxying!** Additionally, Kong 1.3 includes several highly-requested features such as support for upstream **mutual TLS** , **header-based routing** (not only `Host` ), and **database export** , and **configurable upstream keepalive timeouts** , and is built using the latest and greatest [OpenResty 1.15.8.1](https://openresty.org/en/ann-1015008001.html). Kong 1.3.0rc2 also includes the latest **security patches** for the recently-announced NGINX vulnerabilities affecting the HTTP/2 module. ## Download ๐Ÿ“ฆ [Download Kong 1.3.0rc2](https://bintray.com/kong) today โ€” as always we are looking forward to your feedback! - โš  All packages have been renamed from `noarch` to `amd64`, in anticipation to the ARM64 packages that should be released with Kong 1.3.0 final. For more details about the updated installation, please visit the official docs: [https://konghq.com/install](https://konghq.com/install/). ## Whatโ€™s new in Kong 1.3.0rc2 ๐ŸŽ† #### Fixes - ๐Ÿ”’ Security - Patches to the NGINX core (1.13.6) fixing vulnerabilities in the HTTP/2 module ([CVE-2019-9511](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-9511), [CVE-2019-9513](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-9513), [CVE-2019-9516](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-9516)) - ๐Ÿ”Œ Plugins - Consumer references in various plugin entities are now properly marked as required, avoiding credentials that map to no Consumer [#4879](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4879) - **hmac-auth** : Correct the encoding of HTTP/1.0 requests. [#4839](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4839) - **oauth2** : empty client\_id wasnโ€™t checked, causing a server error. [#4884](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4884) - **response-transformer** : preserve empty arrays correctly. [#4901](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4901) - **prometheus** : updated to version 0.4.1 - โš™ Admin API: - Ensure PUT works correctly when applied to plugin configurations. [#4882](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4882) - ๐Ÿ‘ทโ€โ™‚๏ธ PDK: - Prevent calls from failing in custom content blocks. This fixes a misbehavior affecting the Prometheus plugin. [#4904](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4904) - Ensure `kong.response.add_header` works in the `rewrite` phase. [#4888](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4888) ## And a recap of all the new stuff in the 1.3.0 series ๐ŸŽ† - ๐ŸŽ† **Native gRPC proxying.** Kong gained new ability to proxy gRPC traffic through it and to the upstream gRPC services. [#4801](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4801) - ๐ŸŽ† **Mutual TLS** handshake with upstream services. Kong can now present a client certificate while TLS handshake with upstream services. [#4800](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4800) - ๐ŸŽ† **Route by any request header**. The router now has the ability to match Routes by any request header (not only `Host` ). [#4758](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4758) - ๐ŸŽ† **Newly open-sourced plugin** : the [session plugin](https://github.com/Kong/kong-plugin-session) (previously only available in Enterprise) is now bundled in Kong. It can be used to manage browser sessions for APIs proxied and authenticated by Kong. [#4685](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4685) - ๐ŸŽ† **Least-connection load-balancing**. Kong can choose upstream server to connect to based on the amount of connections currently with them. [#4528](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4528) - ๐ŸŽ† A new section in the `kong.conf` file describes [injected Nginx directives ](https://konghq.com/blog/kong-ce-nginx-injected-directives/) (added to Kong 0.14.0) and specifies a few default ones. This should help user getting rid of most of the customized Nginx templates eventually. [#4382](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4382) - ๐ŸŽ† New configuration properties allow for controlling the behavior of upstream keepalive connections. Which should reduce the number of `502` errors some customers may see. [#4382](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4382) - ๐ŸŽ† **Database export** via the new `kong config db_export` CLI command. Exported file can be used for running Kong in DB-less mode (added to Kong 1.1.0) or be imported back into the database later. [#4809](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/4809) - The new โ€œCA Certificatesโ€ core entity. - Support for more listening flags. - Improvements on the easiness use of Admin API. - New PDK capabilities. - ๐Ÿš€ **Tons of** bugfixes and performance improvements! ๐Ÿ—’ Hereโ€™s a link to the [1.3.0rc2 Changelog](https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/1.3.0rc2/CHANGELOG.md#130rc2). ๐Ÿ‹ The updated Docker image is live on [Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/_/kong). โฌ† The recommended upgrade path is the usual one, and is detailed in the [1.3 Upgrade Path](https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/1.3.0rc1/UPGRADE.md#upgrade-to-13) We encourage everyone to run this release candidate in their test environments and give us your feedback! This forum is a great way to ask questions or post feedback, and the [GitHub issues](https://github.com/Kong/kong/issues) is the place for bug reports. Thank you all for the feedback in this release candidate series, and keep it coming! ๐Ÿ’š ---
**Author:** ![jeremyjpj0916](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/jeremyjpj0916/32/1388_2.png) [@jeremyjpj0916](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/jeremyjpj0916)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2019, 10:03pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-3-0rc2-available-for-testing/4250/2 "2019-08-16T22:03:41Z")
Hoping to test this sometime before Wednesday, especially curious if the Kong as a LB doing active health checks factoring in the FQDN along with the ip:port pair is working great now. Been really looking forward to cutting out some middleman LB tools and letting Kong handle that all! ๐Ÿ˜„ One slight concern I have around Kong as LB is this: > Which Kong solved in one iteration for pure regular upstream proxying by adding the option to do the rebuilds to the background as a pattern with eventual consistency. Might be doable in this case as well. Thanks for all Kong Core teams hard work! #KongStrong ---
**Author:** ![hisham](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discuss.konghq.com/hisham/32/14_2.png) [@hisham](https://discuss.konghq.com/u/hisham)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2019, 5:56pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-1-3-0rc2-available-for-testing/4250/3 "2019-08-19T17:56:23Z")
Yes, it should be possible to add eventual consistency to the balancer module as well, though that might be extra tricky because of healthchecker interactions. I havenโ€™t thought deeply about it, but itโ€™s a cool idea. Still, that particular line mentioned in #4883 which resets the upstream list cache in the `PATCH` and `DELETE` callback has been there for for a long time (since 0.x days), so I donโ€™t think thatโ€™s a new regression. It would be interesting though to see if adding a dummy `get_all_upstreams` invocation to the callback just to refresh the cache would do any difference, since is triggered by the Admin API and already runs async to the proxy-path requests.