* [alpha] Building on the 1.7 work to allow encryption of resources such as secrets, a mechanism to store resource encryption keys in external Key Management Systems (KMS) was introduced. This complements the original file-based storage and allows integration with multiple KMS. A Google Cloud KMS plugin was added and will be usable once the Google side of the integration is complete.

    to learn more.
*   Adds optional `exclude_cols` parameter to CsvDataset. This parameter is the
    complement of `select_cols`; at most one of these should be specified.
*   We have implemented an optimization which reorders data-discarding
    transformations such as `take` and `shard` to happen earlier in the dataset