HBase 2.0 is the next stable major release for Apache HBase scheduled for early 2017. It is the biggest and most exciting milestone release from the Apache community after 1.0. HBase-2.0 contains a large number of features that is long time in the development, some of which include rewritten region assignment, perf improvements (RPC, rewritten write pipeline, etc), async clients, C++ client, offheaping memstore and other buffers, Spark integration, shading of dependencies as well as a lot of other fixes and stability improvements. We will go into technical details on some of the most important improvements in the release, as well as what are the implications for the users in terms of API and upgrade paths. Existing users of HBase/Phoenix as well as operators managing HBase clusters will benefit the most where they can learn about the new release and the long list of features. We will also briefly cover earlier 1.x release lines and compatibility and upgrade paths for existing users and conclude by giving an outlook on the next level of initiatives for the project.