# Kong 2.2.0-alpha.1 is released! **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Created:** [September 11, 2020, 8:56pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-2-2-0-alpha-1-is-released/7118 "2020-09-11T20:56:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **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:** [September 11, 2020, 8:56pm UTC](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/kong-2-2-0-alpha-1-is-released/7118/1 "2020-09-11T20:56:03Z")
Hello everyone, As previewed in our last [Online Meetup](https://discuss.konghq.com/t/online-meetup-kong-gateway-2-2/7034/3), we are happy to announce today **Kong 2.2.0-alpha.1**! This is the first pre-release for the 2.2.0 series. Since 2.2 is a minor release there are no breaking changes with respect to the 2.x series, but being an alpha pre-release, development is **not** feature-frozen at this time: and any new features introduced here may change between this release and 2.2.0, and more new features are also in the works! ## What’s new in Kong 2.2.0-alpha.1 - 🎆 **UDP support** : Kong now features support for UDP proxying in its stream subsystem, supporting proxying, load balancing and plugins. - 🎆 **New Response Phase for Go and Lua** : both Go and Lua pluggins now support a new plugin phase called `response` in Lua plugins and `Response` in Go. Using it automatically enables response buffering, which allows you to manipulate both the response headers and the response body in the same phase. This enables support for response handling in Go, where header and body filter phases are not available, allowing you to use PDK functions such as `kong.Response.GetBody()` , and provides an equivalent simplified feature for handling buffered responses from Lua plugins as well. - 🚀 **Hybrid mode synchronization performance improvements** - 📧 Add `X-Forwarded-Path` header: if a trusted source provides a `X-Forwarded-Path` header, it is proxied as-is. Otherwise, Kong will set the content of said header to the request’s path. - 🏗 PDK: New function `kong.request.get_forwarded_prefix` : returns the prefix path component of the request’s URL that Kong stripped before proxying to upstream, respecting the value of `X-Forwarded-Prefix` when it comes from a trusted source. [#6251](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/6251) - 🔌 grpc-web: Introduce configuration pass\_stripped\_path, which, if set to true, causes the plugin to pass the stripped request path (see the `strip_path` Route attribute) to the upstream gRPC service. - 🔌rate-limiting: Support for rate limiting by path, by setting the `limit_by = "path"` configuration attribute. Thanks [KongGuide](https://github.com/KongGuide) for the patch! [#6286](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/6286) - 🔌prometheus: Remove unnecessary `WARN` log that was seen in the Kong 2.1 series. [#6258](https://github.com/Kong/kong/pull/6258) Also note: - ⚠ **OpenResty has been bumped to [1.17.8.2](http://openresty.org/en/changelog-1017008.html)**, as well as our usual set of patches and [lua-kong-nginx-module](https://github.com/Kong/lua-kong-nginx-module). - ⚠ **Cassandra 2.x support is now deprecated**. If you are still using Cassandra 2.x with Kong, we recommend you to upgrade, since this series of Cassandra is about to be EOL with the upcoming release of Cassandra 4.0. ## Download For folks interested in trying the alpha release take Please note that the donwload locations for the alpha release is kept separate from the final release locations: - 📦 You can download [packages](https://bintray.com/kong/kong-prerelease) - 🐳 or use the unofficial [kong/kong](https://hub.docker.com/r/kong/kong/tags?page=1&name=2.2.0) docker repository 🗒 More details and PR links are available at the [2.2.0 Changelog](https://github.com/Kong/kong/blob/2.2.0-alpha.1/CHANGELOG.md#220-alpha1). ## Feedback welcome! Feedback is extremely encouraged! Let us know your thoughts and experiences using 2.2.0-alpha.1 here on Kong Nation and make sure to report any issues over at our [Github repo](https://github.com/kong/kong/issues)! 🦍 Happy Konging! 🦍