I agree with Himanshu we should keep JDK 8 support for integrations if we feel those are important.
As far as lifecycle goes, JDK 8 support will continue as part of several linux distributions. For instance, RedHat has taken on the role of publishing clean upstream builds for OpenJDK JDK8 <https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk8-upstream-binaries> and JDK11 <https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk11-upstream-binaries> updates, with support until 2026 <https://access.redhat.com/articles/1299013>. This means JDK8 will probably not go away for some time with enterprise users. Before we can even deprecate 8 we should at least make 11 (or later) the default / preferred JDK version. What would help is to have some first hand accounts of people running production deployments with 11. I don't think we have a good sense of whether there are any significant performance differences between 8 and 11. We should rule out any regressions before we make it the default. I also agree with Julian that we should keep the ball rolling. The biggest hurdle was (hopefully) to get from 8 to 11, and the changes for 15 should hopefully be smaller, but it's important we keep the momentum going. Generally I would recommend we support the LTS JDK versions + the latest Other projects (e.g. Apache Kafka) does the same and builds 8+11+15. If we are concerned about build times, we can consider running integration tests for preferred version and reserve the full suite of JDKs for release candidates. Xavier
