# Redpanda v26.1.13

- Product: Redpanda (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/redpanda)
- Vendor: Redpanda Data
- Date: 2026-07-17
- Version: v26.1.13
- Original notes: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/tag/v26.1.13
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/redpanda/releases/v26.1.13

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **fixed** — Fix consumer group lag metrics reporting 0 for read-replica topics
- **fixed** — Fixed a cluster membership lock that could occur when a node was decommissioned while it was being added as a controller raft0 learner
- **fixed** — Fixed a potential broker crash use-after-free in the cloud topics metastore when accessing Raft state during leadership changes
- **fixed** — Fixes a bug in cloud topics compaction that could cause repeated no-op compactions if the topic uses retention or transactions
- **fixed** — Fixes a bug where Cloud Topics with the compact cleanup policy would have log retention policies applied to them
- **fixed** — Fixes an issue where cluster linking would not replicate the partition start offset
- **fixed** — rpk ai no longer requires a selected Redpanda Cloud cluster to run, with its own rpk ai auth login and rpk ai env use independent of rpk cloud session
- **fixed** — Fix a latent double get_exception call on a failed future in cloud topics metastore
- **added** — Add a new enable_development_metrics cluster configuration false by default runtime configurable that exposes internal_rpc_latency metrics to the internal /metrics endpoint when enabled
- **fixed** — Fixes a bug where unnecessary memory allocations and deallocations were being made on the L0 write path in cloud topics
- **changed** — Iceberg Topics will stop creating new parquet files if there is a large backlog of files not yet committed to the Iceberg catalog to avoid OOM when the catalog has rejected Redpanda commits
- **changed** — Optimize the ACL authorization path for all callers including Kafka handlers schema registry Pandaproxy and Iceberg
- **changed** — Prevent oversized allocations and OOMs when using a large number of ACLs in Redpanda
- **changed** — The Iceberg Topics Coordinator will now commit to the Iceberg catalog in chunks to avoid OOM when the catalog has rejected Redpanda commits

##### Bug Fixes
* Fix consumer group lag metrics reporting 0 for read-replica topics. by @bartoszpiekny-redpanda in [#30939](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/30939)
* Fixed a cluster membership lock that could occur when a node was decommissioned while it was being added as a controller (raft0) learner. by @mmaslankaprv in [#31091](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31091)
* Fixed a potential broker crash (use-after-free) in the cloud topics metastore when accessing Raft state during leadership changes. by @nvartolomei in [#31052](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31052)
* Fixes a bug in cloud topics compaction that could cause repeated no-op compactions if the topic uses retention or transactions. by @andrwng in [#31124](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31124)
* Fixes a bug where Cloud Topics with the `compact` cleanup policy would have log retention policies applied to them. by @andrwng in [#31111](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31111)
* Fixes an issue where cluster linking would not replicate the partition start offset. by @andrwng in [#31000](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31000)
* `rpk ai` no longer requires a selected Redpanda Cloud cluster to run. The AI CLI uses its own `rpk ai auth login` and `rpk ai env use`, independent of any `rpk cloud` session. by @birdayz in [#31079](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31079)
* fix a latent double get_exception call on a failed future in cloud topics metastore by @oleiman in [#31045](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31045)

##### Improvements
* Adds a new `enable_development_metrics` cluster configuration (`false` by default, runtime configurable). When enabled, `internal_rpc_latency` metrics are exposed to the internal `/metrics` endpoint. This family of metrics can be expensive (large number of series) - leave it set to `false` to save on metrics scraping costs. by @WillemKauf in [#30957](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/30957)
* Fixes a bug where unnecessary memory allocations/deallocations were being made on the L0 write path in cloud topics by @WillemKauf in [#30983](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/30983)
* Iceberg Topics will stop creating new parquet files if there is a large backlog of files not yet committed to the Iceberg catalog. This helps avoid an OOM when the catalog has rejected Redpanda commits for prolonged periods of time. by @andrwng in [#31036](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31036)
* Optimize the ACL authorization path for all callers (Kafka handlers, schema registry, Pandaproxy & Iceberg) by @WillemKauf in [#30969](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/30969)
* Prevent oversized allocations/OOMs when using a large number of ACLs in redpanda by @WillemKauf in [#30969](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/30969)
* The Iceberg Topics Coordinator will now commit to the Iceberg catalog in chunks, avoiding an OOM when the catalog has rejected Redpanda commits for prolonged periods of time. by @andrwng in [#31036](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31036)

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/compare/v26.1.12...v26.1.13