# Apache Airflow 2.8.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Apache Airflow (https://airflow.apache.org)
- **Version:** 2.8.0
- **Released:** Dec 18, 2023
- **Impact Score:** 5/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/airflow/updates/2.8.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Apache Airflow 2.8.0. Source highlight: Raw HTML code in DAG docs and DAG params descriptions is disabled by default

## New Features
- AIP-58: Add Airflow ObjectStore (AFS) (AIP-58)
- Add XCom tab to Grid (#35719)
- Add "literal" wrapper to disable field templating (#35017)
- Add task context logging feature to allow forwarding messages to task logs (#32646, #32693, #35857)
- Add Listener hooks for Datasets (#34418, #36247)
- Allow override of navbar text color (#35505)

## Improvements
- Consolidate the call of change_state to fail or success in the core executors (#35901)
- Relax mandatory requirement for start_date when schedule=None (#35356)
- Use ExitStack to manage mutation of secrets_backend_list in dag.test (#34620)
- improved visibility of tasks in ActionModal for ``taskinstance`` (#35810)
- Create directories based on ``AIRFLOW_CONFIG`` path (#35818)
- Implements ``JSON-string`` connection representation generator (#35723)

## Bug Fixes
- Fix warning message in ``Connection.get_hook`` in case of ImportError (#36005)
- Add debug log saying what's being run to ``EventScheduler`` (#34808)
- heartbeat failure log message fix (#34160)
- Account for change in UTC offset when calculating next schedule (#35887)
- Add read access to pools for viewer role (#35352)
- Fix gantt chart queued duration when queued_dttm is greater than start_date for deferred tasks (#35984)