- Added Tiered Caching framework with pluggable Ehcache disk cache, configurable policies, stale‑key management, and serializer integration (experimental).
- Enhanced Admission Control with IO usage tracking and IO‑based controller, introduced built‑in secure transports and a new setting to disable pending flush checks.
- Delivered new capabilities such as force‑merge on primary shards, Kuromoji completion analyzer, async gauge metrics, dynamic query counters, plus extensive bug fixes and library version upgrades.