The Apache Kafka community has released version 2.5.0, which includes several new features and improvements, such as the simplification of APIs for transactional use cases, improved producer state retention, ZooKeeper TLS support, and enhanced topic tracking. The release also introduces a new co-group operator to simplify aggregating multiple streams into one table, a toTable() function to materialize tables over streams, and improved support for interactive queries against state stores. Additionally, the community has dropped support for Scala 2.11 in this version and set TLS 1.2 as the default SSL protocol.