The Apache News Round-up: week ending 3 July 2020

Welcome, July! We've had a great week within the Apache community. Here's what happened:

Inside Infra – the third interview in the series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team.
 - Meet Greg Stein --Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 July 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - NEW! ApacheCon@Home: combining ApacheCon North America and ApacheCon Europe in a new, online format! Taking place 29 September - 1 October, registration is OPEN and FREE, with donation options for those wishing to support the ASF. Join us! https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/ 

- CFP for ApacheCon@Home has been re-opened. Hurry! Presentation proposals due on 13 July.
https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/cfp.html

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 907 Apache contributors changed 1,367,670 lines of code over 3,904 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Gary Gregory, Kaxil Naik, Andrea Cosentino, Eugen Stan, and Sebastian Bazley.     

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Application Performance Monitor --
 - Apache Chart 3.0.0 and Python 0.1.0 released https://skywalking.apache.org/

Big Data --
 - Apache Avro 1.10.0 released https://avro.apache.org/
 - Apache Storm 2.2.0 released https://storm.apache.org/
 - Apache Kylin 3.1.0 released https://kylin.apache.org/

IoT --
 - Apache IoTDB (Incubating) 0.10.0 released https://iotdb.apache.org/

Network Client --
 - Apache Guacamole 1.2.0 released https://guacamole.apache.org/

Web Crawler --
 - Apache Nutch 1.17 released https://nutch.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that the following Apache projects are celebrating anniversaries this month? Three cheers to Tcl (20 years); DB (18 years); STeVe (8 years); JSPWiki (7 years); Celix and Tez (6 years); NiFi (5 years); Kudu (4 years); Fluo, MADlib, and Streams (3 years); OpenWhisk (1 year)! https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date

 - Did you know that, as with all Apache software, registration to ApacheCon@Home is free of charge? We do have donation options for those who wish to support the ASF; thank you in advance for your participation. Join us! https://apachecon.com/acna2020/

 - Did you know that John Deere's data platform is powered by Apache Flink and Apache Spark to scalably receive and processes millions of sensor measurements per second, and adapt to continually increasing volumes of data? https://flink.apache.org/ https://spark.apache.org/

Apache Community Notices

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019 https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: June 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/June2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 11:25AM Jul 03, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

Apache Month in Review: June 2020

Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community. Here's a summary of what happened in June:

New this month --

 -"Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019 https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature

 - ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
  -- Announcing ApacheCon @Home 2020: ApacheCon North America and Europe have been combined and will be held online 29 September - 1 October 2020. Join us! https://apachecon.com/acah2020

 - "Inside Infra" --a new interview series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team
  -- Meet Greg Stein --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg and Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2

 - ASF Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

 - Apache Month in Review: May 2020 https://s.apache.org/May2020

Important Dates --

 - Next Board Meeting: 15 July 2020. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

 - ApacheCon @Home 29 September - 1 October 2020

Infrastructure --

In May, 860 Apache Committers changed 19,454,137 lines of code over 16,319 commits. The Committers with the top 5 highest contributions, in order, were: Gary Gregory, Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Sebastian Bazley, Andrea Cosentino, and Claus Ibsen.

Project Releases and Updates --

New releases from Apache Archiva (Build Management); Beam (Big Data); Calcite (Big Data); Commons IO (Libraries); Commons BCEL (Libraries); Curator (Messaging); CXF Fediz (Libraries); Flink (Big Data); Fortress (Identity Management); HttpComponents Client (Servers); HttpComponents Core (Servers); Hudi (Big Data); Jackrabbit (Content); JSPWiki (Content); Libcloud (Cloud Computing); NetBeans (Integrated Development Environment); PDFBox (Content); Pulsar (Messaging); Qpid (Messaging); ShardingSphere (Big Data); Skywalking and Nginx (Application Performance Management); Tomcat (Servers); Traffic Control (Servers).

The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. Congratulations to Apache Hudi, which graduated as a Top-Level Project this month https://s.apache.org/odtwv. Welcome to Apache Pegasus (incubating) as the latest podling to enter the Incubator! We invite you to review the many projects currently in development in the Apache Incubator http://incubator.apache.org/   

# # #

To see our Weekly News Round-ups, visit https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/ and click on the calendar in the upper-right side (published every Friday) or hop directly to https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/Newsletter . For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. We appreciate your support!

Posted at 01:33PM Jul 01, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

Inside Infra: Greg Stein --Part II

The "Inside Infra" interview continues with ASF Infrastructure Administrator Greg Stein, who shares his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.

How or what would you describe the Infra "brand" to be?

I don't really know. I've never really thought about branding or marketing ourselves, so ...

Well, you guys have a certain persona, you have those funky t-shirts you wear at ApacheCon ...there's definitely some kind of street cred that's different from everybody else. I was curious to see if that's part of your natural sense of hip, or is that something that you guys deliberately planned for.

The t-shirts and other things go back to the team bonding kind of thing. We'll give ourselves an identity, but haven't tried to create or market ourselves. I think it is something that we do need to take some control over. We hired a part-time writer in December and he's been organizing our content to provide a better and more useful front to Infrastructure.

There were a lot of pages on www.apache.org that have now moved over to infra.apache.org. That creates a more coherent Web space, if you will. We can really talk about those different channels. "How do you reach Infrastructure? Do I go to the Slack channel or do I file a JIRA ticket: how do I decide?" So he's helping to, while I wouldn't say "market a new face", he's certainly helping people figure out who we are, what we do, what we can help with and getting that information organized.

Which is good. That's new. Even to have you guys featured in a project like this, it's unusual and it's refreshing. I'm personally curious, and I'm sure other people are also curious about what's behind Infra.

Right, right. Who are these crazy guys spread around the world that are keeping 200 machines up and running for all these different projects and committers and contributors?

So Andrew (technical writer Andrew Wetmore) is primarily going to work on the infrastructure docs until those are whipped into shape because a lot of the material that we have, a lot of the Webpages, is really infrastructure related. He has been working with the team on those pages. What's going to be harder though is when he's kind of at a stopping point for that, what to turn his focus to, and that would be www.apache. But then it gets a lot more difficult because when he wants to update the How It Works page, who does he talk to? Who's authoritative? He can do some edits for flow and word consistency, punctuation, clarity, right, but he can't really update the process.

Right. Right. That's the Foundation thing.

Yeah. But the problem is we don't really even have a concept of who's in charge of that How It Works page, who is, you know, it's just there's nobody that the foundation is willing to say, "That person controls that process." You know what I mean?

I totally do --I come across the same pages and people go, "Are they yours?" It's hard to determine not only evolving processes, but who signs off on this or who gets it. I hear you.

I've recommended for the past year, or three, that Marketing is the owner of DubDubDub (www.), but you know, that's the "face" of Apache. You know? But the raw content, as you point out, who approves the raw content.

One thing that I asked Drew and Chris, and I'm always curious with people who are super busy and juggling 50 things, is to describe a typical workday for you.

I wake up, I look for email first, generally, sometimes I'll hop onto Slack because sometimes people ask me directly for something. Then I go look at email and sort through a number of different categories between direct team stuff, operations, the Apache Board, and then Apache in general. And then of course, if there's any vendor email to deal with. So there's a bunch of different categories in priority order. After I get through that initial work, then it's go and read all the back scroll in the team channel, which is anywhere from 200 to 400 lines of back scroll ...

Can you get any work done? Beyond just catching up on the communications?

Yes. But it does take like 30 minutes to read that back scroll. For me there's a lot in there about what the guys are doing and what they're working on, how to solve a particular problem when they're asking somebody else, "Hey, can you look at this? Can you help me with this?" But I don't, for the most part, "serve", you know ...they are the technical staff... I can do it: I have technical chops, but I let them do their jobs as they know best. I do like reading the back scroll because I'm also looking at it from the angle of "how is the team working together? Is that going well? Is there something that I need to poke and prod to improve how they're working? Are they getting jammed up on something that I can unblock for them so that they can get their work done?"

Stuff like that. That's what I look for when I go through that back scrolling, so it's important to me to read that back scroll. Most of the guys do tend to, when they first sign in in the morning, go back and scan for stuff where they might be needed. I've never really asked them how detailed they get, but I think pretty much everybody reads all of it to catch up, but they're going to be looking at it with a different lens than how I look at it. Mostly I'm looking at unblocking --are they running into problems that I can ease for them?

How do you keep your workload organized?

I don't.

Fair enough. Again, there's a lot, so it's curious to me, like everything at Apache, with the exception of a handful of things, everything could be a priority, if you're always on fire and always running around, putting out fires, you know? It's funny when I've talked to the Infra guys and you also, you all have the same reaction to that question, which is the laugh. I think that's the nature of the beast with the ASF.

Yes. That really is the nature of system administration work. My career has been product development, and you can reasonably plot that out. You can say, "We're going to develop these five new features, which is going to take us between two and four months." We'll see...we might cut a feature to try and limit our time development. The feature is going to change, unless we'll plan in time for change. But system administration is very reactive, so it's a very different beast. This is where, like I said, we were kind of treading water with four people, but we could see as Apache was growing we were not going to be able to keep up. And we certainly weren't going to be able to move ahead of the curve and do things like selfserve.apache.org where, you know, before we would get a dozen tickets to create repositories and that took time. Now we don't have to do anything.

It's all selfserve.apache.org, but we had to write the tool first and have enough air time to get that tool written. So I think we're ahead of the curve. We're getting some of our longer-term initiatives done, but it is still a very reactive thing. For myself, my back office work is pretty straightforward and it's a lot of email and Website work, you know, going in, paying an invoice, putting in the infrastructure credit card, sending out a purchase order, stuff like verifying and improving payroll, that doesn't require me sitting down and writing Python scripts.

The other half of my job is being present on that channel because I also help to set priorities. When something comes up, I ask, "Is this a thing that we want to do? Do we want to take on this new task? Do we want to provide this new tool to the projects?" You know, like a project is going to say, "Well, we want to integrate this thing into our GitHub repository," and we go and review it. It may require permissions that we simply don't want to allow. So there's some of those kinds of policy kind of things that I also help with. And there's always being present to help set policies and priorities.

OK... so how do you work with (VP Infrastructure) David Nalley? Are you making the decisions? Infra is an unusual type of group as opposed to other areas of activity operationally at the ASF. How do you work together?

Correct: I'm the day-to-day, so I look at it like he's the brains and I'm the hands. That said, he's like the strategic brain and I do all the tactical decisions.

I make all the tactical decisions. I am an officer of the corporation. I can make any decision that I need to, related to Infrastructure. If I feel it's a little bit weird, then I'll bounce that off David, but for most of the stuff, he doesn't feel a need to inject himself in. He feels comfortable letting me go ahead and run with the things, and rely upon me asking when it seems a little sketchy.

That's good: that process suits both of your personalities, both your sensibilities. It sounds like a good fit.

I report to the VP of Infrastructure, and that is still David, even though he became Executive VP and is now (ASF) President. He still holds that title. He's asked me, "Well, Greg, maybe you should just be VP Infra," and I said, "No way." Because we're paid people, but the Foundation is all volunteers. I told him I do not want to be a VP, because I want to report to a volunteer. I think that I (and the team) should report to a volunteer that always has a volunteer eye on the Foundation's long-term goals.

Because I manage all the day-to-day, it's a very lightweight hat for him. That VP hat is a tiny aspect compared to his President hat. One day, he'll find somebody to take over that VP Infra hat, but I've essentially mandated to him that it has to be a volunteer position.

It's not that I see we're going to go all out of control and we need a check from a volunteer; I just want a volunteer to always be able to say, "Okay, you guys are a little bit crazy, let's redirect our long-term thinking more in line with what the Foundation wants," and have a volunteer interpret what the Foundation wants.

That perfectly dovetails into what folks referred to in our ("Trillions and Trillions Served") documentary, where they were talking about Greg Stein's famous "plan for the ASF for 50 years..." This super long-term vision, which again, everyone goes back and says, "Greg Stein said..." What does that mean exactly, and how does that translate to Infra, considering that you can't really plan that far out? How does that work?

Well, actually we can plan that far out. I wrote that "50 years" in one of my Director's statements, I think it was 2014 or 2012 ...maybe earlier. Where I was going in that Director statement was the Board doesn't deal with the communities. The Board is there to support the communities. So we want the Foundation to exist for 50 years so that these communities can continue to run and see through evolution.

Some communities are going to move to the Attic, new ones are going to come along, but we want the Foundation to be viable. To say "forever" is okay. Nobody can really put that in their brain. So I just said, "OK, we can think what 50 years means." That is long enough out, but still within people's brain capacity to think, "Okay, what _does_ 50 years mean?"

And so that's where I came up with that. What does the Board need to think about to ensure that we are here 50 years from now and our projects are successful and can run through their lifetime, lifecycles. Apache HTTP and Tomcat, I don't think they are ever going to go away, but you could see maybe in 30 years they might. There might be some other mechanism in computing that would obsolete them, but the model of Apache does need to exist for at least that long.

Now, within Infra, I think we actually can plan that far out because we have growth curves. We see what kinds of computing resources people need. So we can plan for project growth, for machine growth. We can do long-term planning on how we allocate machines among our various cloud resources that we have, and start to schedule those further out. None of that really affects our day to day, but it is something that we can project out a ways and think about what kinds of resources we are going to need two, three, five years from now.

There isn't anything really that we can do for 50 years, but we can keep it in mind. Okay, that is going to be a larger team. That is going to need a larger staff, a full time manager, a full time HR person, a full time... There's different things that will change over that time, but we can actually do some of that projection, although we haven't bothered.

I do the five year plans for the Board, but mostly that is a simple cost growth as opposed to actually changing the structure of the team or the role assignments, because like I said, I think probably within 10 years, we'll probably need to add one or two more staff on top of the head count of six that we have right now. And I think supporting that would still be fine for a part-time person like myself. But once it grows to 10 or 12, then I think it's going to need a real change. Where we need to have a full-time person managing and so, we'll need to adjust the budget considerably to make that happen.

But if we ever get there, the Foundation is going to be likely in a very different position. We're talking 10 years from now. And so, who knows.

So with more than 350 projects and initiatives as we've discussed before, how do you guys stay ahead of the demand? And again, if you're trying to plan for five, ten years out, you mentioned earlier cloud computing. Not so long ago, cloud computing was a novelty. How do you plan for this?

And that is where we try and move more things to selfserve.apache.org, where we look at the kinds of requests that we're getting. The kinds of tasks that we’re performing and find a way to automate that workflow and create more self-serve options for the kinds of tasks that we regularly get tickets on.

Where we used to get tickets on creating Git repositories, we get zero now and, and we can see over the past six months, we've had 20 tickets to do X, is there a way that we can automate that, so we don't have to get our hands on that ourselves and save our hands for doing things like machine upgrades, for rebalancing some of our computer resources, where things are running on an old operating system and we need to get that onto a newer version. Right now, all of our machines are managed by a system called Puppet, which does the basic configuration work for us. But today, we're on two different versions of Puppet, a really old one and a reasonably new one.

And we're trying to get everything migrated off the old stuff onto the new but once we finished that migration, we're going to have to start all over again, or maybe switch to a different tool. We're looking at a tool called Ansible to use instead of Puppet.

And so there's this never-ending ongoing set of tasks, but each time we do it, it reduces our workload by that much more. So when we upgrade from Puppet 3 to Puppet 6, we get an improvement in the maintainability of that server. And that means that we spend less time with that server going forward and have more time to do other things or to deal with project growth.

Regarding a scale of efficiency, how do you close your skills gaps? When I spoke to Chris and Drew, they both said, "We do everything." How do you do that? How do you know all of this? Do you look at this big picture and say, "Okay, we need a person to specialize in X and Y and Z," and then you send them out to learn about it? How do you cope with that?

The team definitely specializes. And the guys have specializations around different areas, but we do a little bit of cross training, but not a lot because as I mentioned, we've got like 200 machines, each individually doing their own thing. If we cross trained everybody in everything, we'd get nothing done. So, there's a little bit of cross training, but mostly some specialties. It does create a little bit of bus factor...

Which is very scary. I was just going to say, your bus factor is very scary. Talk about that.

The thing is that Puppet allows us to create configurations and that's in version control. If all of a sudden somebody leaves, another person can backfill them because if somebody leaves, it's not like they take their work with them: all the work is in version control. And so that work doesn't go with them, but we may need to backfill some education on that particular specialized area. For example, Chris (ASF Infra team member Chris Thistlethwaite) does a lot of our monitoring work. If he left, now we need somebody to get a little more familiar with NodePing and a little more familiar with Datadog, but that'll be like a week for somebody to pick that up.

It wouldn't be, "Oh my God, this is three years of expertise that we need to go backfill" ...we don't have anything that is that highly specialized.

Is that because the team is more well rounded or because you guys are more efficient or what about it? Because of technology evolution, or...

We don't deal with systems of that level of complexity. We've got 200 machines, like I said, each doing their thing, but it's not like we've got a cluster of 200 machines all trying to coordinate to create one particular outcome. It's, here's my SQL server, here's a JIRA server, here's a Puppet server. Things like that, where the amount of technology is pretty small in each little pocket ... but we just have a hundred pockets on our pants.

[END OF PART II]

Posted at 02:53PM Jun 29, 2020 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 26 June 2020

Farewell, June --we're wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 July 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m 

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 917 Apache contributors changed 3,498,501 lines of code over 3,692 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Manfred Moser, Sebastian Bazley, Andrea Cosentino, Gary Gregory, and Claus Ibsen.      

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Application Performance Monitor --
 - Apache SkyWalking 8.0.1 and Nginx LUA 0.2.0 released https://skywalking.apache.org/

Big Data --
 - Apache Calcite Avatica 1.17.0 released https://calcite.apache.org/avatica

Build Management --
 - Apache Archiva 2.2.5 released https://archiva.apache.org/

Libraries --
 - Apache CXF Fediz 1.5.0 released http://cxf.apache.org/fediz.html

Messaging --
 - Apache Pulsar 2.6.0 released https://pulsar.apache.org/

Servers --
 - Apache Traffic Server 8.0.8 and 7.1.11 released https://trafficserver.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Apache Cordova released OSX 6.0.0? https://cordova.apache.org/ 

 - Did you know that Apache Royale released the new, nifty Tour De Jewel component to demonstrate progress on pages? https://royale.apache.org/ 

 - Did you know that the Python agent for Apache SkyWalking is in development? http://skywalking.apache.org/ 

Apache Community Notices

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019 https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: May 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/May2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 09:35AM Jun 26, 2020 by Sally in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 19 June 2020

Happy Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 15 July 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.72%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 902 Apache contributors changed 5,499,342 lines of code over 3,942 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Chunen Ni, Sebastian Bazley, Rupeng Wang, Gary Gregory, and Andrea Cosentino.      

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Cloud Computing --
 - Apache Libcloud 3.1.0 released http://libcloud.apache.org/

Servers --
 - Apache HttpComponents Client 5.0.1 GA released https://hc.apache.org/
 - Apache Traffic Control 4.1.0 released https://trafficcontrol.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that you can meet Apache APISIX (Incubating), catch up with Apache CloudStack, see what’s next with Apache HBaseas the project celebrates its 10th Anniversary, and more? Only on Feathercast --the voice of the ASF https://feathercast.apache.org

 - Did you know that Tencent uses Apache Pulsar to process tens of billions of dollars in financial transactions each day? http://pulsar.apache.org/ 

 - Did you know that Apache Cordova has a major release for iOS? https://cordova.apache.org/ 
 

Apache Community Notices

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019 https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: May 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/May2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 05:46AM Jun 19, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 12 June 2020

Hurrah for Friday! We've had a great week within the Apache community. Here's what happened:

"Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019 https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 

Inside Infra – the third interview in the series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team.
 - Meet Greg Stein --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 17 June 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.98%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 350 committers changed 922,742 lines of code over 2,850 commits. Top 5 committers, in order of commits, are: Andrea Cosentino, Guillaume Nodet, Jark Wu, Raphaël Ouazana, and Michael Vorburger.             

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
 - Apache ShardingSphere 4.1.1 released https://shardingsphere.apache.org/
 - Apache Beam 2.22.0 released https://beam.apache.org/
 - Apache Flink Stateful Functions 2.1.0 released https://flink.apache.org/

Content --
 - Apache Jackrabbit 2.20.1 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/
 - Apache PDFBox 2.0.20 released https://pdfbox.apache.org/

Integrated Development Environment --
 - Apache NetBeans 12.0 released https://netbeans.apache.org/
 - Newly Identified Inactive Malware Campaign: Impact on Apache NetBeans https://blogs.apache.org/netbeans/entry/newly-identified-inactive-malware-campaign 

Libraries --
 - Apache Commons IO 2.7 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/
 - Apache Commons BCEL 6.5.0 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-bcel/

Messaging --
 - Apache Qpid JMS 0.52.0 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Servers --
 - Apache Tomcat 8.5.56, 9.0.36, and 10.0.0-M6 released https://tomcat.apache.org/
 - Apache HttpComponents Core 5.0.1 GA released https://hc.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that you could help with the next version of Apache OpenOffice? https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache-openoffice-needs-your-help 

 - Did you know that Airflow Summit 2020 will be held 6-17 July online? https://airflowsummit.org/  

 - Did you know that Beam Summit 2020 will be held 24-28 August online and free of charge? https://beamsummit.org/
 

Apache Community Notices

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: May 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/May2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 01:25PM Jun 12, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

Inside Infra: Greg Stein --Part I

Greg Stein. "Gregg St-eye-n"

When people need to find you, are you at gstein@? Has that always been your handle for everything?

Ever since high school, actually. I was gjs@ for a bit in college, but went back to gstein@. I started at Google early April 2004, and Gmail launched on April 1, so I was able to get my work email ID, gstein@gmail. So it’s great, but also rather annoying, because there are a lot of Gary Steins and Gertrude Steins and George Steins, and I get all of their email ... I get plane tickets, hotel reservations ... I got a proposal from the Gates Foundation once. I had some crazy bitter angry lady yelling at her husband as they were getting divorced, and she could rant. I mean, wow: that lady had a pirate's mouth.

But she didn't have his email address.

Apparently not.

When and how did you get involved with the ASF?

I left Microsoft in 1998, and the product group I was working in was building WebDAV into various Microsoft products. I thought the concept of WebDAV was very cool, and wanted the Open Source world to have it. That meant writing a module for the Apache Web Server. I think it was September 1998 when I started posting to the Apache mailing list and looking at how to plug in a WebDAV module. That was Apache 1.3 at the time. I developed a module called mod_dav for Apache 1.3, And when we started Apache 2.0 in 2000, I donated the module to Apache, and it became a standard module in Apache 2.0.

I remember that: I did the press release for that way back when. I knew you were connected with mod_dav, but didn't realize the path as to how you got there. It's very interesting.

That's what brought me to Apache, when they started putting together the foundation: it was in the Spring of '99. I remember asking Roy if I could be one of the first members of the foundation, and Roy's answer was basically like, "We already had the set of people locked in. You'll probably get nominated and voted in at our first member meeting," which occurred in September 1999. So yes, I was in that first batch of new members rather than the original membership.

You've been a member of the ASF much longer than you've been involved with ASF Infra. What were the previous hats you were wearing at the ASF? You've been here for a while, and have had a lot of different configurations.

This is true. So I'm a committer on HTTPd (Apache HTTP Server) and then a PMC Member, an ASF Member. I helped start the APR (Apache Portable Runtime) project with some of the other Web server committers, we pulled that out of HTTPd and created APR, and we used that for 2.0. We used APR, whereas Apache 1.3 was essentially the combination of the two, one big code base. Then Justin Erenkrantz and I started Apache Serf, and that was a high performance C-based client library for HTTP. But we didn't have three people in the community, so it couldn't really be an Apache project. So we took it out of Apache and started working on it on our own, and then eventually Subversion started to use Serf, and so we got more committers on Serf, and the community kind of built up around it because of Subversion. So we ran Serf externally, but just like it was an Apache community, it was Apache licensed and so on. Eventually we wanted to move it back into Apache, and I don't recall off hand, but we went straight to a TLP from our external project back to Apache Serf.

Early 2000, it was January or February, (ASF co-Founder) Brian Behlendorf approached me about helping with the network protocol for this new version control system they were starting at CollabNet, because he knew my background in HTTP and WebDAV. That “V” stands for versioning. I got involved with the Subversion project that Spring. That was also run as a very egalitarian Open Source project, very similar to how we run stuff at Apache. I was really the only Apache person, but Karl Fogel just knows how to run a great community, and so all those values that we cherish in communities at Apache were part of Subversion from day one, but was run by CollabNet. I was hired in 2001 to manage their development team. Eventually, CollabNet wanted to turn it into a vendor-neutral thing that wasn't only CollabNet, so they started a small LLC called the Subversion Corporation. Once the IP was transferred to the Subversion Corporation, people said, "Okay, let's move to Apache," because nobody wanted to deal with the overhead of the Subversion Corporation. We approached Apache at the end of 2009, and Subversion became Apache Subversion. I was the first VP for that. I think that's the only VP hat I've worn.

In 2001, I was elected to the Board at the Members meeting, and in 2002, Roy decided to step down as Chair and said, "Oh, Greg should be Chairman." He just kind of threw me under the bus that way, but I agreed, and that's when I became ASF Chairman. I was chairman until 2007, which is the longest-running chairman. I think Brett Porter did four years.

I think it was 2009 when you hosted us at the Harvard Club and Doug Cutting was appointed Chairman, but he said he didn't really want to travel, do much press stuff, or be a face of Apache. Roy came to the rescue, threw me under the bus again, and said, "Greg can be Vice Chairman, and we'll have the Vice Chairman do all that stuff”. So I held the Vice Chairman role until September 2016, when I gave up my director position, the Vice Chairman position, and VP of Subversion, because that's when I became Infrastructure Administrator.

Over the years, I did a bunch of volunteer work for ASF Infrastructure. I helped out with what we call AP mail: adjusting moderators, changing aliases, things like that. So I've had AP mail access for quite a while when I was doing that. Upayavira wrote id.apache.org for people to review their Member records, change their passwords, etc. I helped him with some of that stuff. That was all written in Python, so I was able to help out.

Python before Python was popular.

I've been using Python since 1995, and I've contributed to Python itself. We set up the Python Software Foundation in 2001. When I say “we”, I mean myself and Dick Hardt from ActiveState. We took the Apache bylaws, and added a different class of membership to it so that companies would become... I forget what we called them, like corporate members or something. The normal people were called nominated members, as they were nominated by somebody else and voted in. But this gave corporations a vote at the table on the board and anything else that members would get a vote on. So the core of the Python Software Foundation came from Apache.

Back to ASF Infrastructure. In 2016 we had four people on staff in Infrastructure, and our volunteer VP of Infrastructure didn't have enough volunteer time to be able to provide support and management for those four people, plus we wanted to hire two more people. With six people, he was right out. So we spent a lot of 2016 trying to figure out how to create a “manager” for the Infra team. At the time the idea of an “executive director” type position was also thrown around, but a full-time position to manage four or six staff is completely overkill, and we certainly didn't have the budget for a full-time position. Somewhere around late August, I realized that there was an email that Ross (former ASF President Ross Gardler) sent and I thought, "I can do that. That's a half-time job. I'm certainly happy to do it. I've managed engineering teams before.” Now, infra's not an engineering team, they don't really develop products, but it's pretty close to engineering management. At a minimum, it's personnel management, which I've been doing since the '90s.

So I threw my hat in the ring. Ross ran it by the Board and the team, and nobody raised a strong concern, so in his authority as President, he went ahead and hired me half-time. It was the day of our Board meeting --I resigned all my positions, and we appointed my replacement for Vice Chairman and my Director position that day, both of which I believe were Sam. He filled my role as Director, and I started as Infrastructure Administrator.

What does “Infrastructure Administrator” mean? What does it entail: are you hands-on coding solutions like the rest of the team? Are you solving problems? What do you do?

I chose the title because I didn't want to be called “manager”: I didn't want to feel like I'm the boss. I wanted to help with the administrative side, make sure the guys get paid, deal with the invoices, handle what you might call back office kind of stuff, and let the team focus on what they do best, which is the system administration. (ASF Infrastructure Team Member) Daniel Gruno does some development work in addition. I do a little bit of development work. For me, it's more like where in my hobby time I might work on Subversion, but now my hobby time is coding Infrastructure type stuff, so it's not really part of my work duties. I deal with salaries, raises, bonuses, getting the payroll done, and for our contractors, getting them paid. I also deal with third party contracts for things like Travis CI, for lists.apache,org ... that's with PonyMail. I make sure that our vendors get paid, and our contractors and employees get paid.

How was the Infra team structured, and how many are in the team?

We have five full-time people that work on Infrastructure: all five are system administrators. Daniel Gruno does maybe 30% system administration and 70% tool development. We don't develop any products, because we're not an Apache community. We write tools, but don't actually develop any products. This is why PonyMail is in the Incubator: it was originally written by one of the people on Infra, but we didn't want to run that as an Infra community. With only five people, we don't really want to be a community lead or anything like that.

The joke is if somebody wants to move into my position, they lose half their salary, because my position is part-time. It's not really a promotion: it would be a loss to do anything. So unlike a corporation with 10,000 people on staff, career development is a little more difficult. It's really a job for people that enjoy Apache and enjoy our mission, and also enjoy working with the other people on the team.

Who does ASF infra serve?

Our primary users are all the communities at Apache. We've got over 200 communities, and those are the primary users. I don't like calling them “customers”, but in a corporate world, they would probably be considered our customers, and we serve those users. There's 8,000 people with accounts that are working on different projects, but the user base is way, way larger than that, because people can file JIRA tickets and work on the wiki and do things like that without actually being an Apache Committer. So the user base is even larger. Then you start looking at all the people subscribed to all of our mailing lists, and that number goes even higher. There's probably 10% of our work which is also supporting the administrative side of the Foundation itself.

For the Board, your role in PR, and Trademarks, and Legal, and the office of the President and various other operational type stuff, we spend 5-10% of our time. A lot of what we do applies naturally across all of the user base, because the foundation uses the same tool set as our communities. Subversion, mailing lists, JIRA, Confluence, etc. We help with account creation, the LDAP management, what sort of permissions people have to access different things...

One of the neat things that we've done, and I've actually had a couple of communities ask us about it, is our GitBox setup where our projects can use GitHub. But then we also mirror all that source code back to Apache so that we have a copy of it for provenance tracking. And in case GitHub does something dumb, we have our own copy of the code. Any changes made on GitHub get sent to our mailing list or get mirrored into JIRA. Our projects can see all the activity on GitHub, and it gets mirrored into our mailing lists where we prefer that our community work is performed.

That's actually a pretty cool feature that we've done at Apache.

It's interesting to see communities outside of Apache that emulate structures and processes and solutions that the ASF has created. It's cool to see it even happening on an infrastructure level. How does ASF infra differ from other organizations or other open source foundations?

Most of them don't really have teams. Most projects out there do their work on GitHub, and don't have their own source control. They don't have account management, they don't run mailing lists. We do all this stuff that most Open Source projects just don't deal with.

They also don't have the scale that we have.

Yes. Because they're one project, and we have over 200 projects. Most projects have some repositories hanging out on GitHub or on GitLab, or wherever else that they might host: if somebody wants to run a demonstration of that project, they buy their own virtual machine and AWS, and pay that out of pocket. At Apache, all of our projects can have virtual machines hosted by Infra, where they install their software for demonstration purposes. They can point people at that VM, so they can check out the product in live motion. So that ability to run VMs is also pretty unique to the Foundation. When you look at the Linux Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation, those are a little bit different. They're not a charitable organization like us. They're a 501(c)(6), which is really like a trade association.

Like a consortium.

Yes, a consortium. I believe that they do have infra teams, but their business model is quite different from ours. If you look at Mozilla, they have the Mozilla Foundation, but that's kind of a shell; Mozilla Corporation essentially runs everything, and the foundation is like a legal shell wrapped around the corporation.

You mentioned earlier that we have 200 projects: you're referring to 200 Top-Level Projects (TLPs), but we also have sub projects and initiatives. At Apache, we have more than 350 different activities going on --you guys touch all of those. It's not like there's any aspect of ASF that you're not involved with or you're not supporting.

That's correct. And I say 200 because I'm thinking mostly from a TLP thing.

Irrespective of the existence of sub projects, you're still dealing with other communities and projects: there's more than just the 200. Hats off to you guys. It's quite a lot of work.

We've got about 200 different machines and each one runs something different. Some companies have 50 copies of a machine that they'll start up in the cloud, running some container --we never do that. Each individual machine is configured one by one and they're all different. And so 200 machines to support the 350 initiatives. It's a lot of heterogeneous work and that can be kind of distracting, but it's also very interesting because we do support such a wide variety of stuff for our projects.

There's what, five Infra team members, and we have 350 projects and initiatives going on. That's a lot of stuff happening: is it non-stop?

Yeah, it's nonstop. That's why we went from four to six people, we were sort of treading water, but we weren't really able to move forward on a number of our longer term initiatives. So when we went to six people in November 2016, that made us a lot more hands-on, if you will. That meant that we could actually make some progress on this longer term work that we wanted to accomplish. Some of that is like https://selfserve.apache.org/ , where people can get things done instead of filing a JIRA ticket and having us do the work for them.

Is that popular? Do people use it?

Oh, absolutely. When somebody opens a JIRA ticket to say, "Can I have this Git repository?” or “Can you create a JIRA Space for me?" we close the ticket and say, "Go to selfserve.apache.org". Before, where everybody would file a ticket for a Git repository or file a ticket for JIRA, file a ticket for Confluence, or whatever, we just close them all down now, and they use selfserve.apache.org instead. We simply won't do those things anymore. So selfserve.apache.org is actually quite handy. And then about four months ago we've added a feature called asf.yaml: it allows communities to control a lot of the finer grained aspects about how their repositories are used, like how do they publish Web pages from a repository, or if you make a change, where does the commit email go? Which mailing lists? Does it go to their development list? Or do they have a commit list? If somebody opens a PR on GitHub, where does notification of that go? Those used to all be tickets also, but people can deal with those just by editing a file in their repository now. So again, it reduces tickets and that's our goal where these routine tasks that all the different communities want to perform, we want to move those into a self-served mechanism so that we don't need hands-on all the time. And thus, we can support 350 different initiatives.

That's great to help empower the communities to take care of their own needs, whether they're minor or major, but that also encourages autonomy. So that's really helpful for you guys: you don't need to have a team of 40 people to support the day-to-day.

We do stay busy. You're talking about the influx and we get requests from people through email, through our Slack channel and through JIRA. Of course our monitoring system will tell us when something goes down, so our monitoring systems also give us more work to do, so it is kind of an endless string of queries. Depending on what the task is, each of those different channels is appropriate. For a quick task, hitting us up on Slack is totally fine, but if there's going to be several days of work, we like JIRA tickets so that we can track the work as it progresses.

How do you encourage the team? How do you keep them motivated? What were your challenges with such a huge load to carry: how do you keep everyone going?

One of the big benefits that we have for our team is actually that we're all remote, so we all sit on a Slack channel. We have a team-only channel that we use for communicating, "What's going on? What beer are you drinking today? What are you having for dinner?" I think about my days when I worked at Microsoft or at Google where I sat in the office by myself and it's a very individual experience that I used to have, but now, our team is there all the time on our channel. It's a very social experience: I think that makes for a much tighter team. And it provides a very different experience than what you get at a more “normal” company. That sort of team experience really helps keep people motivated.

People enjoy their jobs more. From a management standpoint, I can certainly say, "If people are sitting there talking about what they're going to make for lunch, there's a drag on the team and maybe we're not seeing the highest productivity possible," but I think that would actually run the counter. Our team is actually more productive as a result of this great team bonding. We have a conference call once a week for 30-60 minutes. And we don't really have to: the team knows what everybody's doing because we're all doing it right in front of everybody. We all get the commit messages. We have our Slack channel. We see the changes to JIRA. We know what each person is doing, but having the call actually gives us a chance to speak to another human so you're not working in your basement all day without any human contact.

We actually have that once a week, if you will, forced human voice contact.

Did that evolve organically? Or was that something planned?

The team was already doing weekly status calls. When I started, I said, "We're going to keep doing that. We're not going to switch out for just, you know, a status email or anything." Before I started, I think they were doing a group edit on a status Web page or something. I don't know if they had calls, but today I mandate the call because I want the team to get together. We've also been doing the group get-togethers at ApacheCon. We got together at ApacheCon Miami, and then the next year in Montreal. Last year we skipped the whole conference format and just got together as a team in New Orleans for four nights.

It was great because it was just us without the distractions of the conference. The conference is good because the INFRA team gets to meet the people that are their users, their customers, the people that we're actually trying to support, all those communities. And the people in the communities get to meet the team. You know, the people that asked, "Can you help me with X?" They get to put a face to those names.

There are times where one of the guys on the team will work with somebody in the community for a couple of weeks to track down some problem, get a virtual machine configured, whatever. All you see is a user ID and the kind of tone of their messages, but at the conference, you can actually put a face to that name, to that ID. That’s really good from a team standpoint. With the team bonding, we spent eight hours a day in this giant penthouse suite in New Orleans on the 30th floor looking out over the Mississippi River. It was very cool, it had space and a big dining table where we could all come in and work. And then I would go around the corner to Mothers and pick up—

Oh my gawd: the po boys ...the debris po boys.

Exactly, you know what I'm talking about.

I lived there. So, yes, I know.

It was literally a block away. So that was our lunch. Every day I was going down to the Mothers, getting a big brown shopping bag full of food and bringing it to the room. We did go there and eat once so the guys could get out of the room for lunch, and each evening we would go as a team out for dinner. After dinner, it's like, “OK, do whatever you want. It's New Orleans.” That was a really good team experience. We were set to go to Nashville this year and then, you know, pandemic ensued. So we called it off.

It's funny: I stumbled across your channel on Slack and, if I remember this correctly, someone was talking about grilling a whole steer or something along those lines. You guys deal with a lot of beef, there’s a lot of meat in this group. So ...

In the team channel, there's a lot of stories about food and beer and other forms of alcohol. We eventually created a cooking channel on Slack because there's other people like Ruth (ASF Executive Vice President Ruth Suehle) and Shane (ASF Vice Chair Shane Curcuru) and others who also like talking about making food. We still have a lot of that discussion on the team channel, but we’ve now got a dedicated channel with a larger set of people talking foodie type of stuff, so that’s very cool.

You were also talking about motivation: I work with each of the guys to find out what they're interested in exploring. Whether it's a new tool or a new product or to write a new tool to improve our workflow, it's like, "What are you interested in? Okay, take point on that, do the research, go do the experimenting." So each of the guys has gotten generally one or two long-term projects that interest them that they want to work on.

[END OF PART ONE]

Posted at 09:07PM Jun 09, 2020 by Sally in SuccessAtApache  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 5 June 2020

Welcome, June! We've had a great week within the Apache community. Here's what happened:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 17 June 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 918 Apache contributors changed 11,483,033 lines of code over 3,726 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Gary Gregory, Claus Ibsen, Andrea Cosentino, and Mark Thomas.          

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Hudi™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/odtwv

Content --
 - Apache JSPWiki 2.11.0.M7 released https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/

Identity Management --
 - Apache Fortress 2.0.5 released http://directory.apache.org/fortress/

Integrated Development Environment --
 - Newly Identified Inactive Malware Campaign: Impact on Apache NetBeans https://blogs.apache.org/netbeans/entry/newly-identified-inactive-malware-campaign 

Messaging --
 - Apache Curator 5.0.0 released https://curator.apache.org/
 - Apache Qpid Proton-J 0.33.5 and JMS AMQP 0-x 6.4.0 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that the following Apache projects are celebrating anniversaries this month? SpamAssassin (16 years); Santuario (14 years); Commons and Wicket (13 years); Sling (11 years); Karaf (10 years); Flume and VCL (8 years); Mesos (7 years); Atlas and Mynewt (3 years) --many happy returns! https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date 

 - Did you know that the first Pulsar Summit will be held 17-18 June? SIgn up today at https://pulsar-summit.org 

 - Did you know that Feathercast is back? The voice of the ASF is up with new projects featured, such as HBase, Shiro, Kafka, SkyWalkng, Ignite, Mahout, and more! https://feathercast.apache.org/ 
 

Apache Community Notices

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: May 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/May2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 10:02AM Jun 05, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Hudi™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source data lake technology for stream processing on top of Apache Hadoop in use at Alibaba, Tencent, Uber, and more.

Wakefield, MA —4 June 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Hudi™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Hudi (Hadoop Upserts Deletes and Incrementals) data lake technology enables stream processing on top of Apache Hadoop compatible cloud stores & distributed file systems. The project was originally developed at Uber in 2016 (code-named and pronounced "Hoodie"), open-sourced in 2017, and submitted to the Apache Incubator in January 2019.

"Learning and growing the Apache way in the incubator was a rewarding experience," said Vinoth Chandar, Vice President of Apache Hudi. "As a community, we are humbled by how far we have advanced the project together, while at the same time, excited about the challenges ahead."

Apache Hudi is used to manage petabyte-scale data lakes using stream processing primitives like upserts and incremental change streams on Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or cloud stores. Hudi data lakes provide fresh data while being an order of magnitude efficient over traditional batch processing. Features include:

• Upsert/Delete support with fast, pluggable indexing
• Transactionally commit/rollback data
• Change capture from Hudi tables for stream processing
• Support for Apache Hive, Apache Spark, Apache Impala and Presto query engines
• Built-in data ingestion tool supporting Apache Kafka, Apache Sqoop and other common data sources
• Optimize query performance by managing file sizes, storage layout
• Fast row based ingestion format with async compaction into columnar format
• Timeline metadata for audit tracking

Apache Hudi is in use at organizations such as Alibaba Group, EMIS Health, Linknovate, Tathastu.AI, Tencent, and Uber, and is supported as part of Amazon EMR by Amazon Web Services. A partial list of those deploying Hudi is available at https://hudi.apache.org/docs/powered_by.html

"We are very pleased to see Apache Hudi graduate to an Apache Top-Level Project. Apache Hudi is supported in Amazon EMR release 5.28 and higher, and enables customers with data in Amazon S3 data lakes to perform record-level inserts, updates, and deletes for privacy regulations, change data capture (CDC), and simplified data pipeline development," said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Analytics, AWS. “We look forward to working with our customers and the Apache Hudi community to help advance the project."

"At Uber, Hudi powers one of the largest transactional data lakes on the planet in near real time to provide meaningful experiences to users worldwide," said Nishith Agarwal, member of the Apache Hudi Project Management Committee. "With over 150 petabytes of data and more than 500 billion records ingested per day, Uber’s use cases range from business critical workflows to analytics and machine learning."

"Using Apache Hudi, end-users can handle either read-heavy or write-heavy use cases, and Hudi will manage the underlying data stored on HDFS/COS/CHDFS using Apache Parquet and Apache Avro," said Felix Zheng, Lead of Cloud Real-Time Computing Service Technology at Tencent.

"As cloud infrastructure becomes more sophisticated, data analysis and computing solutions gradually begin to build data lake platforms based on cloud object storage and computing resources," said Li Wei, Technical Lead on Data Lake Analytics, at Alibaba Cloud. "Apache Hudi is a very good incremental storage engine that helps users manage the data in the data lake in an open way and accelerate users' computing and analysis."

"Apache Hudi is a key building block for the Hopsworks Feature Store, providing versioned features, incremental and atomic updates to features, and indexed time-travel queries for features," said Jim Dowling, CEO/Co-Founder at Logical Clocks. "The graduation of Hudi to a top-level Apache project is also the graduation of the open-source data lake from its earlier data swamp incarnation to a modern ACID-enabled, enterprise-ready data platform."

"Hudi's graduation to a top-level Apache project is a result of the efforts of many dedicated contributors in the Hudi community," said Jennifer Anderson, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Uber. "Hudi is critical to the performance and scalability of Uber's big data infrastructure. We're excited to see it gain traction and achieve this major milestone."

"Thus far, Hudi has started a meaningful discussion in the industry about the wide gaps between data warehouses and data lakes. We have also taken strides to bridge some of them, with the help of the Apache community," added Chandar. "But, we are only getting started with our deeply technical roadmap. We certainly look forward to a lot more contributions and collaborations from the community to get there. Everyone’s invited!"

Catch Apache Hudi in action at Virtual Berlin Buzzwords 7-12 June 2020, as well as at MeetUps, and other events.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Hudi software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Hudi, visit http://hudi.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apachehudi 

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects enter the ASF through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/ 

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 813 individual Members and 7,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus. Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF 

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Hudi", "Apache Hudi", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Posted at 01:00PM Jun 04, 2020 by Sally in General  |   | 

Apache Month in Review: May 2020

Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community. Here's a summary of what happened in May:

New this month --

 - The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes 34 New Members https://s.apache.org/q14mx

 - Support Apache: help the ASF continue to provide $20B+ worth of software –at 100% no cost– for the public good https://s.apache.org/GivingTuesdayNow2020

 - Apache Everywhere: the first "short" from the "Trillions" documentary filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI 

 - Announcing New ASF Board of Directors https://s.apache.org/Board2020  

 - ASF Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19 

 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m  

 - "Inside Infra" --a new interview series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team. Meet Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew

 - Success at Apache: the monthly blog series that focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works".
   - Bringing the Apache Beam firefly to life by Julián Bruno https://s.apache.org/bmq4l
   - Remote Collaboration in the Time of Coronavirus" by Marvin Humphrey https://s.apache.org/dkffj

 - Happy 10th Anniversary Apache HBase https://s.apache.org/m2pxf 

 - Apache Month in Review: April 2020 https://s.apache.org/Apr2020

Important Dates --

 - Next Board Meeting: 17 June 2020. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

Infrastructure --

In May, 905 Apache Committers changed 62,477,961 lines of code over 15,350 commits. The Committers with the top 5 highest contributions, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino, Manfred Moser, Claus Ibsen, Jean-Baptiste Onofré, and Liang Zhang. 

Project Releases and Updates --

New releases from Apache Ant (Build Management); Arrow (Big Data); Beam (Big Data); Calcite (Big Data); CloudStack (Cloud Computing); CouchDB (Big Data); Daffodil (Libraries); Druid (Big Data); Flink (Big Data); Groovy (Programming Languages); Ignite (Big Data); IoTDB (IoT); Impala (Databases); Jackrabbit (Content); jclouds (Cloud); JMeter (Testing); Kudu (Big Data); Kylin (Big Data); Log4j (Libraries); Lucene (Search); NLPCraft (Natural Language Processing); NuttX (Operating System); OFBiz (Enterprise Processes Automation / ERP); OpenMeetings (Web Conferencing); PLC4X (IoT); Qpid (Messaging); ShardingSphere (Big Data); Subversion (Version Control); Syncope (Identity Management); Tomcat (Servers); UIMA (Content); Wicket (Web Frameworks); ZooKeeper (Databases).

The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. Welcome new podlings AgensGraph (graphing database), which entered the Incubator at the very end of April, as well as Liminal (machine learning), which was submitted just a few days ago. Congratulations to Apache ShardingSphere, which graduated as a Top-Level Project this month https://s.apache.org/315iv .We invite you to review the many projects currently in development in the Apache Incubator http://incubator.apache.org/   

Community --

Apache Community Development ("ComDev") welcomes new participants to the Apache community and mentors them in "The Apache Way".

Budapest, Hungary, is named the latest Apache Local Community (ALC) Chapter https://s.apache.org/yot34 . The Apache Local Community program is a relatively new initiative, and launched early 2020. Four ALC chapters are up and running; for more information, including how to set up your a local chapter for your community, visit https://s.apache.org/alc .

# # #

To see our Weekly News Round-ups, visit https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/ and click on the calendar in the upper-right side (published every Friday) or hop directly to https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/Newsletter . For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. We appreciate your support!

Posted at 11:48AM Jun 01, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 29 May 2020

Farewell, May --we're wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 17 June 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m 
 - CFP EXTENDED for ApacheCon North America: submissions due 1 June https://www.apachecon.com/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.74%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 900 Apache contributors changed 2,695,384 lines of code over 3,697 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Manfred Moser, Andrea Cosentino, Gary Gregory, Congxian Qiu, and Claus Ibsen.        

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
 - Apache Arrow 0.17.1 released https://arrow.apache.org/
 - Apache Calcite 1.23.0 released https://calcite.apache.org/
 - Apache Ignite 2.8.1 released https://ignite.apache.org/
 - Apache Beam 2.21.0 released https://beam.apache.org/

Cloud Computing --
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache CloudStack v 4.14 https://s.apache.org/l5ps8

Content --
 - Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.8.22 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

IoT --
 - Apache PLC4X 0.7.0 released https://plc4x.apache.org/ 

Search --
 - Apache Lucene 8.5.2 and Solr 8.5.2 released https://lucene.apache.org/

Version Control --
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Subversion 1.14.0-LTS https://s.apache.org/osr65

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Apache OpenOffice now features new extensions for Danish spellcheck and hyphenation dictionaries? https://openoffice.apache.org/

 - Did you know that due to the coronavirus, Pulsar Summit is virtual this year? Catch live & interactive sessions by Splunk, Verizon Media, Iterable, Yahoo! JAPAN, TIBCO, OVHcloud, Clever Cloud and many more! https://pulsar-summit.org/

 - Did you know that Japanese work-life site Haken-EN is powered by Apache Wicket? https://wicket.apache.org/ 
 

Apache Community Notices

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: April 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/Apr2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 07:10AM May 29, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® CloudStack® v 4.14

Mature Open Source Enterprise Cloud platform powers billions of dollars in transactions for the world's largest Cloud providers, Fortune 5 multinationals, educational institutions, and more.

Wakefield, MA —28 May 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® CloudStack® 4.14, the latest version of the mature, turnkey enterprise Cloud orchestration platform.

Apache CloudStack is the proven, highly scalable IaaS platform of choice to rapidly and easily create private, public, and hybrid Cloud environments: it "just works". CloudStack originated at Cloud.com in 2010, which was acquired by Citrix in 2011. CloudStack was submitted to the Apache Incubator in 2012 and graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP) in March 2013.

Apache CloudStack includes the entire "stack" of features in an IaaS cloud: compute orchestration, Network-as-a-Service, user and account management, full and open native API, resource accounting, and a first-class user interface.

"v4.14 is an exciting release for Apache Cloudstack and is the result of many months of collaboration by our community," said Sven Vogel, Vice President of Apache CloudStack. "We are introducing a number of major new features that have been driven by demand by users and operators of CloudStack based IaaS environments. At the same time, we have kept to the project's ethos of having a tightly defined scope and being the platform of choice on which to layer other services."

Of particular note are:

• Cloudstack Kubernetes Service gives operators the ability to deliver CaaS or K8aaS style services with no change to underlying  infrastructure or business process
  
  
• VM Ingestion gives operators the ability to easily “import” existing VMware environments into Cloudstack
  
  
• The new backup and recovery framework, allows operators to integrate with any backup platform, giving a seamless user experience from the Cloudstack UI/API
  
  

"Apache Cloudstack 4.14 ships with a Technical Preview of Cloudstack’s new User Interface," added Vogel. "This presents a new, ‘enterprise feel’ user experience and is earmarked to replace the current UI. We are encouraging all Cloudstack users to explore the Technical Preview and give feedback to the community. Thank you to all of the contributors across our community who have made this release possible."

More than 200 new features, enhancements, and fixes include:

• New modern UI (Project Primate, Technical preview)
• Backup and Recovery framework
• Backup and Recovery provider for Veeam 
• VM ingestion
• CloudStack Kubernetes Service
• L2 network PVLAN enhancements 
• UEFI support
• KVM rolling maintenance
• Enable Direct Download for systemVM templates 
• Template Direct Download support for Local and SharedMountPoint storages 
• VR health checks
• Download logs and diagnostics data from SSVM/CPVM/VRs
• Enable additional configuration metadata to virtual machines

The full list of new features can be found in the project release notes at http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/en/4.14.0.0/releasenotes/index.html .

Apache CloudStack powers thousands of clouds and billions of dollars in transactions across an array of organizations that include Apple, BT, INRIA, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), SAP, Taiwan Mobile, Verizon, and WebMD, among others. A list of some of Apache CloudStack’s users are available at http://cloudstack.apache.org/users.html .

Highlighted in Forrester’s Enterprise Open Source Cloud Adoption report, Apache CloudStack "sits beneath hundreds of service provider Clouds", and is behind numerous elastic Cloud computing services, including those at Fortune 5 multinationals as well as solutions ranked as Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders.

Availability and Oversight
Apache CloudStack software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache CloudStack, visit http://cloudstack.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/cloudstack .

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 813 individual Members and 7,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus. Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF .

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "CloudStack", "Apache CloudStack", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Posted at 01:00PM May 28, 2020 by Sally in General  |   | 

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® Subversion® 1.14.0-LTS

Community-led Version Control Software and Source Code Management Tool Available on Most Integration Servers, Integrated Development Environments, Issue Tracking Systems, and more.

Wakefield, MA —28 May 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Subversion® 1.14.0-LTS, the latest release of the popular centralized software version control system.

Apache Subversion ("SVN") provides a version controlled backing store for any kind of data. It records an accurate log of changes made to that data over time, and keeps track of who made them. Subversion allows users to commit files and directories, recover previous revisions, and even maintain multiple variations of their work in parallel. Able to service projects of any size, from individuals up to large scale collaborative efforts, Subversion is ideal for work in vast swaths of industries, from software development to semiconductor design, scientific research to medical technology. An Apache Top-Level Project for over a decade, Subversion celebrated its 20th Anniversary earlier this year.

"First and foremost, I'd like to thank all of our developers and community members who helped make this release possible," said Nathan Hartman, Vice President of Apache Subversion. "We are excited to publish our latest LTS release, and the first in the 1.14 line."

As an LTS release, the focus is on stability and availability. These are achieved through the project's policies. For any change in core code to be included in updates to 1.14.x, the change must first undergo a process of nomination and voting for backport. At least three Subversion developers must support the change, with none having concerns about it.

LTS (Long Term Support) is an industry designation that a particular release line is planned to be maintained for a longer period of time than regular, non-LTS releases. For the Subversion project, this means that later updates to the 1.14.x series may contain bug fixes and security updates only. Any bleeding edge new features, even if developed during the lifetime of 1.14.x, will have to be introduced in a separate release line. Server operators and system administrators usually prefer LTS releases for stability, while end users often choose the latest release (LTS or not) to get the newest features.

Numerous third parties provide Subversion install packages for Windows, macOS, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and other operating systems. To maximize platform independence, Subversion is implemented with strict conformance to ISO C90, one of the most widely supported software coding standards worldwide. In addition, the Subversion developers provide bindings that enable integrations with software coded in popular web languages: Java, Ruby, Perl, and Python.

Particularly noteworthy for this release, Subversion's language bindings for Python received significant attention. Python 3 is supported, up from Python 2 in prior Subversion releases, an oft requested improvement that keeps Subversion 1.14.0-LTS current with the changing Python landscape. While this was a major undertaking, the project also tackled the challenge of maintaining compatibility with the older Python 2. This legacy support is expected to phase out gradually, as Python 3 continues to gain mindshare across the computing industry, but the Subversion project has a long tradition of maintaining compatibility wherever practical, giving operators of legacy systems some much-needed breathing room as they make the transition.

Among Subversion's strengths are its extensive support for working with giant repositories. The bedrock of this support is its centralized model, which allows users to check out only the portions of a repository that they need. The ASF uses Subversion this way in its own infrastructure, housing more than 80 of its Apache Top-Level Projects and sub-projects comprising millions of lines of code, including Subversion itself, in a single Subversion repository that makes all 1.8 million revisions of that information available to collaborators worldwide.

When dealing with such vast amounts of data, including all of its revisions, one might wonder about storage costs. Subversion uses a variety of techniques to minimize storage, including temporal compression, spacial compression, and data deduplication.

Another improvement in Subversion 1.14.0-LTS is a new tool in support of deduplication that could help some administrators reduce future storage costs. The deduplication feature uses an internal database named rep-cache.db. If deduplication was previously disabled, the database may not contain all necessary entries. The new feature, known as the 'svnadmin build-repcache' command, allows re-adding such missing entries and provides a way for those who had previously turned off deduplication to regain some of its benefits.

The release also includes several experimental features. One of these, Shelving and Checkpointing, allows users to save, restore, and roll back snapshots of their work, without making commits to the central repository. This is useful for setting aside a work in progress to work on something else, or for taking temporary snapshots when a network connection to the server is unavailable. Another experimental feature, Viewspec, allows users who create different cross-sections or "views" into their version controlled data, to save the layouts of those views and easily recreate them later. These experimental features are designated as such because they are not yet considered feature-complete. In Subversion 1.14.0-LTS, they are turned off and hidden by default, but are made available on an opt-in basis to entice open source community members to help further their development.

Subversion users, developers, and other stakeholders routinely communicate with each other through email lists. One ongoing discussion taking place there centers around a proposal to make Subversion even stronger at handling big files. The discussion thread, titled "Who else is using SVN for large-binary-asset storage?" has already generated some enthusiasm.

"Apache Subversion is more than code, it's a community," added Hartman. "As an open source and purely volunteer-driven effort, we thrive on participation from enthusiastic users and developers worldwide. We welcome their involvement in the future of Subversion and on our email lists."

Subversion 1.14.0-LTS is available now. The complete software source code can be downloaded from https://subversion.apache.org/download.html , with a list of install packages which are maintained by numerous third parties at https://subversion.apache.org/packages.html .

Over its 20-year history, Subversion has grown to become the most popular version control system on the market, and remains the leading centralized versioning and revision control software today. Millions of users worldwide depend on the collaboration-friendly system to easily access all files and historical data simultaneously without code conflicts or corruption. 

Apache Subversion is used for mission-critical code distribution and collaboration workflow by Adobe Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Google, Halliburton, Microsoft Visual Studio, Python, Ruby, Skype, SourceForge, and WordPress, among many others. The ASF's infrastructure uses Apache Subversion across millions of lines of code and nearly two million commits by more than 300 Apache projects.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Subversion software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Subversion, visit http://subversion.apache.org/ .

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 813 individual Members and 7,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, CarGurus. Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF 

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Subversion", "Apache Subversion", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Posted at 12:00PM May 28, 2020 by Sally in General  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 22 May 2020

Happy Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 17 June 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m 
 - CFP EXTENDED for ApacheCon North America: submissions due 1 June https://www.apachecon.com/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.98%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 906 Apache contributors changed 30,740,023 lines of code over 3,548 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Liang Zhang, Andrea Cosentino, Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Claus Ibsen, and Peter Palaga.          

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
 - Apache Kudu 1.12.0 released https://kudu.apache.org/
 - Apache Kylin 2.6.6 and 3.0.2 released https://kylin.apache.org/

IoT --
 - Apache StreamPipes (Incubating) 0.66.0 released https://streampipes.apache.org/

Libraries --
 - Apache Log4j 2.13.3 released https://logging.apache.org/

Programming Languages --
 - Apache Groovy 2.5.12 and 3.0.4 released http://groovy.apache.org/

Servers --
 - Apache Tomcat 7.0.104 released https://tomcat.apache.org/

Testing --
 - Apache JMeter 5.3 released https://jmeter.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that the ASF is one of 10 organizations chosen by FOSS Responders to benefit from their first "UPLIFT!" Virtual Funding Event, being held on Friday 22 May? Thank you in advance for participating! https://fossresponders.com/#events 

 - Did you know that you can help Apache OpenOffice with their next release? Roll up sleeves and jump in! https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache-openoffice-needs-your-help 

 - Did you know that Feathercast is back? The voice of the ASF features hundreds of recordings on Apache projects and their communities, ApacheCon presentations, and more! NEW: interviews with Apache Airflow, Ignite, Kafka, Mahou, OFBiz, Sling, and more. https://feathercast.apache.org 

Apache Community Notices

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: April 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/Apr2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions and "Apache Everywhere", the first "Trillions" "short" filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 09:03AM May 22, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   | 

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 15 May 2020

Happy Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

"Apache Everywhere" – the first "short" from the "Trillions" documentary filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin this past year (just released!) https://youtu.be/nXtIti9jMFI 

Success at Apache – the monthly blog series that focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works".
 - "Remote Collaboration in the Time of Coronavirus" by Marvin Humphrey https://s.apache.org/dkffj

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
 - Next Board Meeting: 20 May 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
 - Notice on Apache 2020 Conferences https://s.apache.org/zgm8m 
 - CFP EXTENDED for ApacheCon North America: submissions due 1 June https://www.apachecon.com/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
 - 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.93%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – this week, 898 Apache contributors changed 5,578,527 lines of code over 3,680 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Radu Cotescu, Adrian Cole, Claus Ibsen, Liang Zhang, and Andrea Cosentino.        

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
 - Apache Flink 1.10.1 released https://flink.apache.org/ 
 - The Apache Software Foundation Announces the 10th Anniversary of Apache HBase https://s.apache.org/m2pxf
 - Apache ShardingSphere UI 4.1.0 released https://shardingsphere.apache.org/
 - Apache Druid 0.18.1 released https://druid.apache.org/

Build Management --
 - Apache Ant 1.9.15 and 1.10.8 released https://ant.apache.org/ 

Cloud --
 - Apache jclouds 2.2.1 released https://jclouds.apache.org/

Content --
 - Apache Jackrabbit Oak 2.21.1 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/
 - Apache UIMA uimaFIT 3.1.0 released https://uima.apache.org/

IoT --
 - Apache IoTDB (Incubating) 0.9.3 released https://iotdb.apache.org/

Messaging --
 - Apache Qpid Proton 0.31.0 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Natural Language Processing --
 - Apache NLPCraft 0.5.0 (incubating) released https://nlpcraft.apache.org/

Operating System --
 - Apache NuttX (Incubating) 9.0.0 released https://nuttx.apache.org/

Servers --
 - Apache Tomcat 8.5.55, 9.0.35, and 10.0.0-M5 released https://tomcat.apache.org/

Did You Know?

 - Did you know that Feathercast --the voice of Apache-- features hundreds of recordings on Apache projects and their communities, ApacheCon presentations, and more? New interviews include Apache Airflow, Ignite, Mahout, OFBiz, and Sling https://feathercast.apache.org 

 - Did you know that the permissive and commercially-friendly Apache License 2.0 is one of the most popular Open Source licenses? http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 

 - Did you know that you can Support Apache –and help the ASF continue to provide $20B+ worth of software at 100% no cost– with a tax-deductible contribution? http://donate.apache.org/ 

Apache Community Notices

 - The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19  

 - The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

 - Apache Month In Review: April 2020 – overview of events that have taken place within the Apache community https://s.apache.org/Apr2020

 - The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q3 FY2020 (November 2019 - January 2020) https://s.apache.org/r6s5u  

 - "Trillions and Trillions Served", the documentary on the ASF, is in post-production. Catch the teaser at https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions

 - Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

 - The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

 - ASF Operations Summary: Q2 FY2020 (August - October 2019) https://s.apache.org/2kv2n

 - ASF Founders look back on 20 Years of the ASF https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/our-founders-look-back-on

 - Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

 - ApacheCon: Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998 http://s.apache.org/ApacheCon

 - "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Posted at 07:46AM May 15, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter  |   |