# Apache Airflow 1.5.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Apache Airflow (https://airflow.apache.org)
- **Version:** 1.5.0
- **Released:** Sep 04, 2015
- **Impact Score:** 5/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/airflow/updates/1.5.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Apache Airflow 1.5.0. Source highlight: v1.5.0 is a huge release. Tons of important features.

## New Features
- @jlowin landed a feature to communicate information across tasks called XCom, more information here
- @neovintage added support for connection to be defined in environment variables, allowing to bypass or override the metadata database
- @kapil-malik added a UI feature where some users can only see their own DAGs while superusers can still see all, this feature is turned off by default

## Improvements
- @jlowin improved the tree view to render a non expendable when trees go above 5k nodes
- Improved the task_instance table to log the operator name and queued timestamp
- Improvements to the unit tests (speed + coverage)