The Apache Software Foundation Blog
The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: 1 May - 31 July 2020
FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY
First Quarter, Fiscal Year 2021 (May - July 2020)
"This Foundation has survived more than two decades of change in the software industry and is stronger now than ever before."
—Roy Fielding, ASF co-Founder and Chairman
> Conferences and Events http://apachecon.com/
During the report period, the Conferences team has been working hard on ApacheCon @Home 2020, which will be the 33rd ApacheCon. Apachecon @Home will feature content from 27 different Apache project communities, including Big Data, Machine Learning, Royale, Pulsar, Tomcat, Geospatial, Community, Camel, and many others. We will also be featuring content in Asia-centric timezones, and, for the first time ever, content in Mandarin, German, and Spanish language.
ApacheCon @Home 2020 will feature keynotes by Thomas Huang (NASA), Camille Fournier (Author) and Edmon Begoli and Josh Arnold (Oak Ridge National Labs).
This event will be our first 100% online edition of ApacheCon, which makes it available for people in every time zone, many of whom have never been able to travel to ApacheCon before. We expect to have more than 2000 attendees, making it the largest ApacheCon ever.
You can learn more about Apachecon (and register!) at https://apachecon.com/acah2020
> Community Development http://community.apache.org/
Throughout this quarter we have been adapting our approach to help mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on our activities. With the changeover of ApacheCon to an online conference (ApacheCon@Home) we have been busy working with the conference team to ensure a good transition. As usual we participated in the ApacheCon@Home CFP and had attracted a lot of submissions. We had enough proposals to plan a 3 day Community track running over two timezones. To help support our global audience it will also the first time that we will be presenting content in languages other than English.
We are also planning to have an online booth available at the event and are currently deciding on the type of activities that we can do remotely that will still generate the feeling of community.
During this quarter we have also kickstarted our podcast platform Feathercast again as a tool for promoting Apache projects. Our objective is to have a podcast created for every Apache project. An initial request was sent out for people to be interviewed about their project. There has been a lot of interest and feedback has been very positive. Currently 12 interviews have been completed and featured on Feathercast. We hope that this will continue to increase.
The Apache Local Community (ALC) initiative is still growing and thanks to Kenneth Paskett from the Central Services team, we now have branding for the ALC chapters that can be customised for each location. The branding helps strengthen the Apache brand locally. ALC Beijing held their first meetup and ALC Indore have held two webinars and will be presenting a range of talks in Hindi for ApacheCon@Home.
Our GSoC student evaluations were completed on schedule and our mentors contine to work with their selected students.
Our mailing list has seen a decrease in traffic compared to the previous quarter, probably due to the holiday season. We do expect to see increased activity levels as we build up to ApacheCon@Home in September.
> Committers and Contributions http://apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html
Over the past quarter, 1,252 contributors committed 41,706 changes that amount to 13,946,950 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino (1,013 commits), Gary Gregory (817 commits), Jean-Baptiste Onofré (715 commits), Sebb (614 commits), and Xiaoxiang Yu (537 commits).
All individuals who are granted write access to the Apache repositories must submit an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). Corporations that have assigned employees to work on Apache projects as part of an employment agreement may sign a Corporate CLA (CCLA) for contributing intellectual property via the corporation. Individuals or corporations donating a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Apache projects need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the ASF.
During Q1 FY2021, the ASF Secretary processed 171 ICLAs, 7 CCLAs, and 1 Software Grant. History of Apache committer growth can be seen at https://projects.apache.org/timelines.html
> Brand Management http://apache.org/foundation/marks/
Operations —the work of the Brand Management team falls broadly into one of three categories:
- trademark transfers and registrations
- granting permission to use our marks
- addressing potential infringements of our marks
The volume of work has remained steady this quarter. Registrations and transfers are lengthy processes but the tracking system we have put in place remains up to the task.
This quarter has seen the usual collection of requests to use Apache marks for user groups, events, merchandise and publications with nearly all requests being granted, subject to our Trademark Usage Policy.
The impact of COVID-19 has seen many events move on-line. Those events that had previously requested to use our marks have been updating their requests to reflect the new event format and often changes in timing. As with in-person events we work with the organisers and the ASF Conferences team to minimise scheduling conflicts.
Registrations —this quarter was a busy one for completing registrations where we saw five registrations complete including the registration of APACHE in the EU.
One registration was up for renewal this quarter and, after reviewing it with the relevant PMC we opted not to renew it.
Some registrations, particularly those outside the US, tend to be more complex. This quarter some of our registrations in China have continued to require additional work to help them progress.
Infringements —Potential infringements are brought to our attention from both internal and external sources. The majority of infringements we see are accidental and our project communities are able to resolve these quickly and informally with occasional input from the Brand Management team. A small number of issues take longer to resolve. We made progress on some of these this quarter and hope that that progress will continue next quarter.
This quarter a number of issues were reported to us relating to products using our marks being sold through various online stores. We have started to engage with the stores in question to resolve the issues.
And finally…
The Brand Management team welcomes your comments and suggestions as well as any questions you might have. Please see https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact for our contact details.
> Security http://apache.org/security/
We continued to work on handling incoming security issues, keeping projects reminded of their outstanding issues, allocation of CVE names, and other general oversight and advice.
For Q1 we tracked 132 new vulnerability reports across 57 projects. (Q1 last year for comparison was 92 reports). Those reports led to 40 published CVE vulnerabilities.
> Privacy http://apache.org/foundation/policies/privacy.html
No other issues have been raised till the last report.
The issue with the Apache Status page https://status.apache.org/ remains unresolved.
Due to the new ruling Schrems-II (as reported recently) the use of Google Analytics may be problematic. Instead, Apache Infra offers log analytics which may fit most projects. We will provide some docs on the available logs and will try to find a way to communicate this to our PMCs.
Also, Privacy needs to check Apache Whimsy for privacy concerns.
> Infrastructure http://apache.org/dev/infrastructure.html
This quarter has been quite normal for Infrastructure, despite the pandemic affecting our world. Since the Foundation does not have a central office, our staff works entirely from home and were able to remain safe and healthy. We do not sell any products, so there has been no economic-based reduction in what Infrastructure provides: services for our many communities. The team has continued its work at our regular breakneck speed and low-cost posture. Our planned meetup at ApacheCon North America was impacted, however, so we hope that 2021 will provide an opportunity for our team to gather together again.
Our Jenkins installation has seen a lot of work this quarter, as have migrated communities over to our CloudBees Operation Center installation. In particular, we now have multiple Jenkins Master instances to help those communities manage their donated Jenkins nodes (eg. the nodes donated to Apache Hadoop, or Apache Beam). One Jenkins cluster will continue as a shared resource for the Foundation as a whole.
The latest and greatest new feature for our communities is a tool we call "asf.yaml", enabling projects to self-manage many facets of their project: website publishing, Jira integration, mailing list notifications for different types of events, and GitHub metadata. These features used to require projects to file work tickets for simple, routine tweaks of their workflows.
A fun thing for our team as been Marketing and Public Relations' new "Inside Infra" blog series. We have been supporting that effort to provide an inside and a "human face" on our otherwise-opaque set of activities on the team.
Our regular activities continue with improving our release archive service, migrating to newer Ubuntu and puppet systems, hardening our GitHub integration, and getting our email system migrated to newer and more manageable servers.
> Treasury and Financial Statement --map against https://s.apache.org/FY2019AnnualReport
The Foundation is in excellent fiscal shape with all tax and compliance forms filed on time. Latest public filings can be found at http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/ . I have advised that officers minimize expenses until there is more certainty in global economic outlooks. Officers have done so by delaying new investments. This combined with a reduction in travel costs from conferences has made it possible for us to significantly reduce costs without reducing our service level to our projects.
In the last quarter we also completed our transition to accounts payable approvals via bill.com. This has vastly improved the accuracy and auditability of our vendor payments and reduced the level of expertise required of the volunteers and staff who manage vendor payments.
The majority of our cash remains in a CDARS account at Boston Private which provides FDIC insurance for the full amount. See below for income and expenses:
> Fundraising http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
Although we find ourselves in unprecedented times, we are happy to report that Fundraising for the foundation continues operating well. We have seen only a few changes in sponsorships with a Platinum sponsor renewing at the Gold level, a Gold sponsor renewing to the Platinum level, a Silver sponsor renewing at the Gold level, and two Silver sponsors unable to renew. Despite the trying times of this pandemic, we are again humbled and honored by our Sponsors' continued support!
This quarter we finished a long-running effort to normalize all sponsorship links on our Thanks page with the rel="sponsored" tag. This is in support of popular webmaster best-practices announced last year which we broadcast as our go-forward model in November of last year.
Fundraising support for ApacheCon @Home launched this quarter with excellent interest. At the close of the quarter, we were pleased to not only see several returning sponsors, but several new sponsors for the ApacheCon events.
In addition to the generous support of our corporate sponsors, we were honored to have received more than $4,000 USD through individual giving to the foundation. Part of this was driven by participation in the #GivingTuesdayNOW COVID-focused giving campaign. We were also awarded a distribution from the UPLIFT! initiative led by FOSS Responders.
As always, we are immensely thankful to our sponsors, who make it possible for our communities to build world-changing software
PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Pineapple Fund, Verizon Media, Tencent
GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Cloudera, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Union Investment, Workday
SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, Red Hat, Target
BRONZE: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Bestecasinobonussen.nl, CarGurus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, The Economic Secretariat, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, Gundry MD, HostChecka.com, Host Advice, HostingAdvice.com, Journal Review, LeoVegas Indian Online Casino, Mutuo Kredit AG, Online Holland Casino, ProPrivacy, PureVPN, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Start a Blog by Ryan Robinson, Talend, The Best VPN, Top10VPN, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, Xplenty
TARGETED PLATINUM: CloudBees, DLA Piper, JetBrains, Microsoft, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype, Verizon Media
TARGETED GOLD: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, Quenda
TARGETED SILVER: Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, Rackspace
TARGETED BRONZE: Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru
Going into the second quarter of our fiscal year, we remain energized and cautiously optimistic that we will weather the current storm.
To sponsor The Apache Software Foundation, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html . To make a one-time or monthly recurring donation, please visit https://donate.apache.org/
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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Mark Cox, Vice President Security; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Christian Grobmeier, Vice President Data Privacy; Myrle Krantz, Treasurer; David Nalley, Vice President Infrastructure; Tom Pappas, Vice President Finance; Daniel Ruggeri, Vice President Fundraising; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; and Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management.
For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, the @TheASF on Twitter, and https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation.
(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2020.
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Posted at 08:12PM Oct 12, 2020
by Sally in General |
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Inside Infra: Daniel Gruno --Part II
The "Inside Infra" series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team continues with Part II of the interview with Daniel Gruno, who shares his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.
Sure, that makes sense. So what's your favorite part of the job? This is going to sound weird for a lot of people, but my favorite part is the weekly meetings. Why does it sound weird? People aren't social? I don't know. It might sound weird to normal people who don't like meetings, that I liked meetings. There's something about meetings... Even though they are very informal meetings, I like the little shred of formality that there are about them. And so that's, I think, my favorite part. And also I get to prepare for them. All right. So you must like preparing for the Board meetings too. Yes. You should read my Apache Web Server reports. What was your biggest challenge when you came into the role at Infra? There were two major challenges. The first one was learning the ropes. This is, as both I have said and a lot of people before me, it's such a complex system at ASF. There are so many things to know and it doesn't just take a year: it takes years to learn enough to get by without someone else's help. So that was, by far, the biggest ... Well, no, that was the second biggest challenge. The biggest challenge was believing in myself and not being scared of doing things unsupervised. Because again, what I can do and what my other colleagues can do with their keyboards is very, very ... We wield a lot of power over a Foundation that is responsible for so much in the world. Not being afraid of typing a command takes a long time when you know what a title can do on a machine. You know, “did you just delete this file or did you delete the entire hard drive”? And especially at the very beginning of getting into the job, I would double, triple, quadruple check everything I typed. I would wait for sometimes minutes before I hit enter just to be sure, I would look up that am I doing the right thing. Just to be sure that I'm not messing things up now. And as you to do it once, twice, three times, 10 times, a 100 times, you become more confident and you also relax more. Your first thought isn't “what if this goes wrong?” First thought is “let's see what happens next”. Or you're thinking ahead to the next debugging step or the next problem solving step instead of being stuck on what if this goes wrong? Which also means unless something goes wrong, you work a lot more efficiently. Because you're not fearing the Enter button. What are you most proud of in your Infra career to date? Let's see. I'm well, probably most proud of ... That's a very difficult question. That's why I ask it. If you don't want to answer, that’s okay. Oh, no, no, no. It's just that I've made so gosh, darn many things. What I'm most proud of is probably ... I would say that lists.apache.org is a thing that's playing out of an Infra job I was doing that. Yeah. I'd say that's probably the thing I'm most proud of. lists.apache.org is very powerful. We all use it every day. So that's yours? With the help of a few friends, yes. It was a brainchild of mine during some tests we had at Infra. And again, it's one of those situations where you have something that's not working and you're like, "Maybe I'll just rewrite it completely and it'll work. And then you start writing and then you find a good idea, a better way of doing some things and some things don't work. And then sometimes eventually you end up with a product that sticks. It's one of the most long lived projects I've had and that's still used today. Well, it's super useful. There's no doubting its efficacy and necessity. I mean, how many mailing lists do we have now? 1,700? It's some crazy number. I think we're nearing 2,500 if you count the private lists. And that's like 25 million emails, so ... That's insane. That's very cool. Very cool. All right, next question. This is the one that everyone kind of laughs at. How would your coworkers describe you? I'll have to think about that. They would probably describe me as the one that suddenly says something completely out of context. (Laughing) Okay. I thought I was supposed to be laughing, not you. That is funny. What happens is when I asked the question, Chris, Drew, and Greg, all laughed. Then they give me their answer and I always laugh. So it's classic. Tell me what you think are the biggest threats that infrastructure teams need to watch out for? I think the biggest threats are relying on tried and tested methods, but forgetting the change and expectations of the user in terms of user experience. I've seen a big change in what a user expects from Infrastructure in terms of user experience. I don't mean they just want it more easy, but I mean people want it more feature complete, they want it to look more intuitive, they want it to tie in together with what they are already using. They want to tie it together with whatever is the next new hot thing. If you stick with what might be good and try it and test it and it's stable, you might end up losing everyone because while it might be that, it might also not be what people are using tomorrow. If it's not what people are using today and tomorrow, then no matter how good it is, people are going to move away from it. Not necessarily outdated in the sense of technology, but more in the sense of trends. What is trendy. Yeah. I mean, it used to be Vine. Now it's TikTok and tomorrow it's going to be something else. If you don't keep up with the fashion of IT, then you're going to find yourself not wanted. That timing out happens more quickly these days, it seems. Okay, what would be advice to aspiring sysadmins or Infrastructure team members? My greatest piece of advice is basically don't be afraid because this ties back into the daunting task of having to push the Enter button after you type something in the command line. Don't be afraid because you'll lose so much time just being afraid that you could have spent fixing things or learning new things or making yourself more at ease. Just jump in with both feet and you'll be fine: you're awesome. Yeah, that's good advice. If you had a magic wand, what would you see happen with ASF Infra? Oh, interesting. I would like to see us having some magic, unified CI system that could be used across the different repository and types we had and didn't require any machines that would just build instantaneously. And yeah, be free of us needing to manage yet and pay for it. And also, if GitBox version two was suddenly a thing tomorrow and I didn't have to actually write it, which I still have to do. Okay. What else do we need to know that I have not asked yet? Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. One thing I'm really good at or one thing I'm really bad at is when you ask me an open question like that, because I don't know where to go with that. I am very good at analyzing a question and coming up with a specific response, which is why when people say, "How are you doing?" I get confused or I say, "I'm okay." And get nervous and forget to ask them how they are doing, because I don't get the dynamics that are happening there." The reason why I ask this question is sometimes people come in thinking, "Okay, this is my area of focus." They might want to talk about the “blue switch” or something specific like that, then we talk about all sorts of other things. We may derail. I may be driving the interview in a certain direction, and they have this pain in their gut because they never got to talk about the blue switch that they wanted to. The only thing I could think of would be something called pip-service, which is a new thing we're making, which is kind of like a package manager for all of our infrastructure services. Again, it's us working smarter instead of harder. And we were defining a way to easily install or run a service on any given machines and set them up without actually having to install and run then set them up. It would require a lot more time to explain in detail, but it's really nifty. Is it coming soon or is it available now? It's in production. And it's really helped us a lot. I love the efficiency of Infra, how you guys are having these new directions ... Like when you and I were dealing with the selfserve.apache.org the other day for the CMS (content management system), when I was getting the Annual Report up. For 21 years, I haven't been able to deal with the ASF CMS and then you walked me through it in literally three minutes on Slack and boom: it was done. I was amazed and shocked --because I'm not a technologist. To me that was phenomenal. You guys are really helping so many different kinds of people with different profiles and different skill sets. It's very cool. I think some of that ties into, again, the CMS was cool 10 years or 15 years ago, but it's not really been able to keep up with what's going on at the moment. No one knows how to use it because it's not very intuitive… Or it's not what we do today. Right. As we’re halfway through the Infra team, who do you think I should be interviewing next? I think you should be interviewing Gavin because he knows a lot about the CI platforms that I have been on, off raving about here. Gavin's not planning to talk to me until October... Oh, well then you should talk to Chris Lambertus, because he doesn't want to talk to anyone. (laughing) Chris can talk a lot about the upgrade of our email infrastructure. We have a lot of very tough work ahead of us in that we're upgrading an infrastructure that again, it works, but it's kind of like upgrading from an IBM mainframe to a modern computer: not that much of a upgrade, but we are having to modernize heavily on our Infra email infrastructure. I understand that's a huge, huge project. It's a very big project, yeah. That's a little advice for sysadmins there. = = =
Posted at 06:26PM Oct 12, 2020
by Sally in SuccessAtApache |
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