The Apache Software Foundation
Blogging in Action.

Wakefield, MA —21 March 2019— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Unomi™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Unomi is a standards-based, Customer Data Platform (CDP) that manages online customer, leads, and visitor information to provide personalized experiences that adheres to visitor privacy rules such as GDPR and “Do Not Track” preferences. The project was originally developed at Jahia, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in October 2015.

"I am truly thankful to our community, especially our mentors, who have helped us achieve this milestone," said Serge Huber, Vice President of Apache Unomi. "The original vision behind Unomi was to ensure true privacy by making the technologies handling customer data completely Open Source and independent. Since it was submitted to the Apache Incubator, developing Unomi using the Apache Way will ensure the project grows its community to be more diverse and welcome new users and developers."

Apache Unomi is versatile, and features privacy management, user/event/goal tracking, reporting, visitor profile management, segmentation, personas, A/B testing, and more. It can be used as:

• a personalization service for a Web CMS;
  
  
• an analytics service for  native mobile applications;
  
  
• a centralized profile management system with segmentation capabilities; and
  
  
• a consent management hub
  
  

Apache Unomi is the industry's first reference implementation of the upcoming OASIS CDP specification (established by the OASIS CXS Technical Committee, which sets standards as a core technology for enabling the delivery of personalized user experiences). As a reference implementation, Apache Unomi serves as a real world example of how the standard will be stable, and is quickly gaining traction by those interested in truly open and transparent customer data privacy. Apache Unomi is in use at organizations such as Al-Monitor, Altola, Jahia, Yupiik, and many others to create and deliver consistent personalized experiences across channels, markets, and systems.

"When Serge and I announced the launch of the Apache Unomi project at the 2015 ApacheCon Budapest, Apache Unomi, at that time, was the first proposal among the rising Customer Data Platform industry's segment, positioned as an 'ethical data-driven marketing' product that would respect the privacy of customers while leveraging the power of unified customers data," said Elie Auvray, Head of Business Development at Jahia. "Jahia's digital experience management solutions are based on Apache Unomi, and we can't wait to see how the project will now evolve with its growing community. Seeing today Apache Unomi becoming a Top-Level Project is a great reward for us as Open Source software believers. We are proud of this milestone, grateful to the Apache Software Foundation and our mentors, and we know it's only the beginning of a new –hopefully long and successful– journey."

"Under development at OASIS, the Customer Data Platform specification –for which Apache Unomi aims to be the reference implementation– lies at the crossroads of many solutions providers needs such as WCM, CRM, Big Data Platforms, Machine Learning, IoT and Digital Marketing," said Laurent Liscia, CEO of OASIS. "At a time when client data interoperability and built-in data privacy are mandatory foundations for legal, consistent, and personalized experiences across channel markets and systems, the CDP specification, together with Apache Unomi, is a clear and welcome answer to end-user concerns."

"Apache Unomi enables Al-Monitor readers to be driven towards additional personalized content that corresponds, via content tags profiling and related automated segmentations, to what they have already accessed," said Valerie Voci, Head of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Al-Monitor. "This data follows our customers where they go, so it's a consistent experience whether they are getting these recommendations in their inbox or on the Website or both. And if a change takes place on one, that change is immediately reflected on the other. It helps us create a very cohesive marketing message and a great overall digital experience."

"As we were developing a progressive web app (PWA) for a client, we were looking for a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to store customer insights, such as behavioral and explicit customer data," said Lars Petersen, Co-Founder at Altola. "Privacy was table stake for us, along with the flexibility to customize data schema and open API. We selected Apache Unomi based on these parameters, we had it up and running on AWS in less than 30 min. and are very impressed with the maturity of the platform, its privacy by design and how easy it was to work with."

"In a digital world, customer data is very important to offer a better experience to users. However, data privacy and trust is not an option for users," said François Papon, CTO at Yupiik. "Apache Unomi is the best solution for our clients because it's an Open Source project managed by an independent foundation, there is no vendor lock-in. It's also based on other solutions like Apache Karaf that made it ready for modularity, scalability, cloud, devops, and more." 

"Apache Unomi is poised to disrupt the Customer Data Platform market," said Thomas Sigdestad, CTO at Enonic, and co-chair, with Serge Huber, of the CDP standards work at OASIS open. "The CDP marketplace is lacking from a standard way of exchanging data, and the vendor space is over-represented by closed source and proprietary cloud offerings. This effectively limits the potential and adoption of CDP in general. Apache Unomi is not merely Open Source, but also the reference implementation of the imminent CDP standard from OASIS. Companies using Unomi will benefit from faster and simpler integrations without locking their customer data into yet another proprietary silo." 

"Graduating as an Apache Top-Level Project is only the beginning," added Huber. "Unomi has a lot of potential that it still to be developed, and is a perfect opportunity for those interested in Customer Data Privacy to participate through our mailing lists and Slack channel, and to learn more about the project on our Website and presentations."

Catch Apache Unomi in action at ApacheCon North America (9-12 September 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada), and ApacheCon Europe (22-24 October 2019 in Berlin, Germany) http://apachecon.com/ .

Apache Unomi 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 Unomi, visit http://unomi.apache.org/

The Apache Incubator is the 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 seeking to join the ASF enter 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/

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 730 individual Members and 7,000 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, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, Leaseweb, Microsoft, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Workday, and Verizon Media. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Unomi", "Apache Unomi", 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.

by Von Gosling, member of the Apache RocketMQ Project Management Committee

Last year, I wrote a blog about how communities from a non-English-speaking country understand and use Apache way for open innovation. In that article, I mainly expressed the desire to be open as a developer, to be good at using mailing lists, listening to community voices and making decisions. In addition, project communities can also organize more programming activities like Google Summer of Code ("GSoC"; applications are now open for the 2019 program) to help developers learn how to become involved in the community-led development process as well as provide greater help and encouragement for developers to join the community. After that, I have been thinking about sharing some Apache RocketMQ community building and collaborative innovation stories through some real-life examples. It is my great honor to share some stories with community at the upcoming ASF anniversary celebration. IMO, The Apache Way has greatly helped Apache RocketMQ to grow its community since entering the Apache Incubator in 2016.

Apache RocketMQ was originally created and used as a distributed messaging engine for online e-commerce transaction processing. It could undertake billions, even trillions of  message transmissions in many companies’ production environments. RocketMQ has been proven to be suitable for high-throughput, low-latency messaging systems in the large-scale distributed scenarios. A standard OpenMessaging project on the Linux Foundation provides a common benchmarking platform[1] for distributed messaging systems in the cloud including Apache RocketMQ. Of course, as a widely used messaging engine, the functional level, RocketMQ provides both pull and push models, supporting scheduled message, ordered message, batch message, broadcast message, message filtering, dead-letter queue and so on, almost sustaining all classic event driven or streaming scenarios. Even so, there are still a few core features not included from an enterprise perspective. Last year, the RocketMQ community announced three attractive features: transactional message, message tracing, authentication and authorization. The transactional message implements the transaction consistency guarantee between the sender and the local business operation. This feature is a very valuable feature which was initiated and contributed by several individuals from the financial industry. While based on transactional messages, we could build a full-stack distributed transaction platform, which is suitable for long-running microservice. 

In the enterprise application for messaging, there has always been a troubling problem. Where did my message send to? How can I find message accumulation if the consumer has failed or not? That’s a very difficult task especially when we are providing cloud pub/sub service, because messaging is an asynchronous decoupling process, the natural upstream and downstream are not aware of each other. Fortunately, some guys from the China Mobile Research Institute found some of the pmc members at Apache RocketMQ Meetup and mentioned their troubles. So, we showed them the latest RIP[2]  plan from the community, which is a very challenging optimization and improvement for Apache RocketMQ intra code. Under the help of a Project Management Committee (PMC) member, RIP were proposed, discussed and accepted. After the necessary time planning, we started to design, coding and discuss, exchange code implementation details, which includes several meetups to gather together to discuss and review the code until the later online verification and released. More interesting, in the following review process, another cloud vendor from the community has joined. After simple video communication, the original implementation was optimized to be compatible with its implementation. Finally, in the community, we are happy to see that the new version has been verified in production by two cloud vendors. The ACL feature is also a process in which the PMC and the community continue to collaborate, and the final version of the RIP is finally published. Through the meetup we collected the requirements, through open discussion, coupled with the video communication using Zoom, the RocketMQ community completed the several important releases in the last year. At the same time, in order to better promote ecological flourishing, several projects residing under the Apache RocketMQ external repository were reorganized (80% above projects contributed by community during incubation). In addition to setting milestones, this time we added similar incubations and graduation mechanism further reduces the difficulty of community participation while better guarantee product quality. Today, several different language sdk projects that have graduated are from a large number of users in use and maintenance. The enthusiasm of the community completely surpasses thoughts. It also verifies that the future cloud architecture is language-independent, even serverless. Under this general trend, the community's guys actively participated in the RocketMQ multi-language ecological construction. RocketMQ now supports java, cpp, python, go, nodejs and other languages are planning and on the way. Even, the current CPP client can support up to 8 platforms, like CentOS, MacOS, Ubuntu and Windows.

Not only that, more and more community enthusiasts are also spontaneously self-organizing: they are also actively planning similar activities in the city station, but also need to give some attention and encouragement by PMCs. At the same time, this also provoked us to think about whether the Apache community should have a developer-oriented role like release manager, such as developer-relationship maintainer, project manager, to let more users understand, and become more involved in the product. The community development in recent years has also brought many new signs to the RocketMQ community. There are more and more active developers in the community. In roughly three months, nearly 2,000 emails were sent from the dev email list. Research has shown that 70% of top banks in China use Apache RocketMQ on the core business link, approximately 60% of Internet finance and insurance customers use RocketMQ in their production environments, and 75% of top 20 Internet companies in China widely use classic pub/sub scenarios.

Recently, the RocketMQ community has been discussing the development of the next-generation messaging platform. We hope it is a unified messaging engine with lightweight data processing platform, and welcome everyone to become involved and tell the PMC what features you are most looking forward to seeing in future versions of RocketMQ.

Many thanks to The Apache Software Foundation for its open and inclusive community culture that helps RocketMQ build a broader community. It will soon be 20th anniversary. I am pleased to represent the RocketMQ community in wishing the ASF a happy 20th anniversary, hoping for many more and continuing to thrive.

[1] https://github.com/openmessaging/openmessaging-benchmark
[2] https://github.com/apache/rocketmq/wiki/RocketMQ-Improvement-Proposal

# # #

Part of the "Success at Apache" series, Project Perspectives chronicles how projects and their communities have benefited from The Apache Way. 

Wakefield, MA —19 February 2019— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced momentum with Apache® Arrow™, the Open Source Big Data in-memory columnar layer.

Since the founding of the project in January 2016, Apache Arrow has quickly become the defacto standard for representing and processing analytical data in memory, accelerating analytical processing and interchange by more than 100x.

"When we became a Top-Level Project, we projected that the majority of the world's data will be processed through Arrow within the next decade," said Jacques Nadeau, Vice President of Apache Arrow. "In just three years time, we are proud to see Arrow's substantial industry adoption and increased value across a wide range of analytical, machine learning, and artificial intelligence workloads."

Highlights of Apache Arrow's success include:

Industry Adoption —more than 20 major technologies adopted Arrow to accelerate in-memory analytics, including Apache Spark, NVIDIA RAPIDS, pandas, and Dremio, among others. A list of known Open Source and commercial implementations can be found at https://arrow.apache.org/powered_by/

Millions of Downloads —leveraging and integrating Apache Arrow into many other technologies has bolstered downloads to more than 1,000,000 each month.

New Language Support —as a cross-language development platform, supporting multiple programming languages is paramount. Apache Arrow has grown from supporting one language to eleven different languages today; they include C++, Java, Python, R, C#, Javascript, and Ruby, among others.

Seamless Data Format Support —Arrow supports different data types, both simple and nested, located in arbitrary memory such as regular system RAM, memory-mapped files or on-GPU memory. In addition, it can ingest data from popular storage formats such as Apache Parquet, CSV files, Apache ORC, JSON, and more.

Major Code Donations —Apache Arrow's new features and expanded functionality are due in part to code and component donations that include:

• C# Library
• Gandiva LLVM-based Expression Compiler
• Go Library
• Javascript Library
• Plasma Shared Memory Object Store
• Ruby Libraries (Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet)
• Rust Libraries (Parquet and DataFusion Query Engine)

Community and Contributor Growth —over the past 12 months, nearly 300 individuals have submitted more than 3,000 contributions that have grown the Apache Arrow code base by 300,000 lines of code. The Arrow community is welcoming approximately 10 new contributors each month.

In January the project announced its most recent release, Apache Arrow 0.12.0, which reflects more than 600 enhancements developed during Q4 2018. The Apache Arrow community is actively working on a number of impactful new initiatives that include solving high performance analytical problems and allowing for more efficient data distribution across entire clusters.

"Apache Arrow's rapid industry adoption and developer community growth supports our original thesis of the importance of a language-independent open standard for columnar data," said Wes McKinney, member of the Apache Arrow Project Management Committee, and creator of Python's pandas project. "Additionally, we are seeing productive collaborations take place not only between programming languages but also between the database systems and data science worlds. We look forward to welcoming more data system developers into our community."

Apache Arrow is a cross-language development platform for in-memory data. It specifies a standardized language-independent columnar memory format for flat and hierarchical data, organized for efficient analytic operations on modern hardware. It also provides computational libraries and zero-copy streaming messaging and interprocess communication. Languages currently supported include C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust.

Apache Arrow 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 Arrow, visit http://arrow.apache.org/

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 730 individual Members and 7,000 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 global conference series. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Arrow", "Apache Arrow", 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.

# # #

Open Source tools used for collecting, aggregating and visualizing software project activity.

Wakefield, MA —30 January 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Kibble™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Kibble is an activity reporting platform created to collect, aggregate, analyze, and visualize activity in software projects and communities. With Kibble, users can track a project's code, discussions, issues, and individuals through detailed views mapped across specified time periods.

"We are passionate about solving hard problems, particularly as they relate to defining and measuring a project's success," said Rich Bowen, Vice President of Apache Kibble. "As doing so is notoriously difficult, we want to provide a set of tools that allow a project to define success, and track their progress towards that success, in terms that make the most sense for their community. Apache Kibble is a way to make this happen."

Apache Kibble is the latest project to enter the ASF directly as a Top-Level Project, bypassing the Apache Incubator (the official entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation). As part of its eligibility, Apache Kibble had to meet the many requirements of the Apache Maturity Model http://s.apache.org/O4p that include a project’s code, copyright, licenses, releases, consensus building, independence, and more.

Kibble is the Open Source edition of Snoot, the enterprise project and community reporting platform used by dozens of Apache projects as well as by the ASF for its official reports including the ASF Annual Report.

"By gaining an in-depth view into the ASF's operations through 1,433 Apache project repositories, we are able to obtain performance metrics for more than 300 Apache projects and nearly 900 million code line changes by more than 6,500 contributors," said Sally Khudairi, Vice President of Marketing and Publicity at The Apache Software Foundation. "We are excited to share the ability to provide insight with projects of all kinds, and help their communities identify trends and advance their impact."

"We're getting input and data from both a wide range of Apache projects as well as projects from outside of the foundation," added Bowen. "We're also collecting historical metrics from older projects with their rich history of successes and mistakes. They have a great deal of history and passion around measuring their communities, and hearing from disparate projects is helping to refine that vision. We would love to hear from more projects about what metrics are important to track, and invite their communities to join our mailing lists to discuss how we can help one another."

Catch Apache Kibble in action at FOSDEM, 3-4 February 2018 in Brussels.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Kibble 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 Kibble, visit http://kibble.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheKibble

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 680 individual Members and 6,500 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, ARM, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Union Investment, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Kibble", "Apache Kibble", 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.

# # #

Forest Hill, MD —10 January 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Trafodion™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Trafodion extends Apache Hadoop to guarantee transactional integrity and operational workloads for new kinds of Big Data applications that run on Hadoop.

 "We are very excited to have been established as an Apache Top-Level Project," said Pierre Smits, Vice President of Apache Trafodion. "Graduation is a terrific milestone that culminates 2.5 years of contributions from around the globe to establishing a growing community committed to delivering a high-grade OLTP solution on top of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem."

Building on the scalability, elasticity, and flexibility of Hadoop, Trafodion (meaning "transactions" in Welsh) is the first integrated Open Source solution that delivers on the promise of integrated transactional and analytical systems (OLTP/OLAP) for Apache Hadoop. Trafodion's features include:

• Fully functional ANSI SQL support, leveraging existing SQL skills;
• Distributed ACID data protection, guaranteeing data consistency across multiple tables and rows;
• Compile-Time and Run-Time Optimizers, delivering performance improvements for OLTP workloads;
• Parallel-aware Query Optimizer, supporting large data sets;
• Apache Spark integration, supporting streaming analysis;
• Interoperability with existing Apache Hadoop tools and solutions, such as Hive, Ambari, Flume, Kafka, and Oozie; and 
• Apache Hadoop and Linux distribution neutrality.

Trafodion originated at HP-IT in 2013, and was donated to the Apache Incubator in May 2015. The project has had four official releases since entering the Apache Incubator. 

Apache Trafodion is in use at China Mobile, China Unicom, Dell EMC, Esgyn Corporation, and Millersoft Limited, among others.

"As a member of the HP Core Team responsible for releasing Trafodion to The Apache Software Foundation, and responsible for the project’s name, I'm thrilled to see the Trafodion community be recognized with this major achievement. Congratulations to all who made it possible," said Ken Holt, COO at Esgyn Corporation. "Trafodion is the heart of EsgynDB, and the community is like its lifeblood — we at Esgyn are committed to continue to grow and support the community."

"Congratulations to the Trafodion community for becoming an Apache Top-Level Project," said Tianduo Gao, Senior Development Engineer of Software Technology (Suzhou) at China Mobile. "We are planning to use Trafodion to expand the business of China Mobile's Big Data platform: our data statistics of 4G real-time business in the country and provinces are more efficient than ever before."

"Becoming a core Apache Project is a major step forward for Trafodion. It will give Millersoft the confidence to introduce the technology to our Big Data clients," said Calum Miller, Director of Millersoft Limited. "Testing of our Open Source Data Vault engine running on top of Apache Trafodion is going well and we look forward to announcing a fully integrated product shortly."

"Apache Trafodion enhanced the operational efficiency of our Big Data platforms, and brought us better customer experience and broader application scenarios," said Charles Yu, Managing Director, Application Services at Dell EMC.

"Congratulations to Trafodion for officially becoming part of the Apache open source ecosystem," said Qingquan Gu, Senior Development Engineer of Internet of Things Marketing Service Center at China Unicom. "Using Trafodion provided China Unicom with the ability to build and integrate Big Data platforms, enhanced our operational efficiency, and brought us better customer experience."

"Becoming an Apache Top-Level Project is only the beginning," added Smits. "We are looking forward to growing the Trafodion community, reaching new adopters and contributors, and fostering a strong ecosystem around the project."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Trafodion 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 Trafodion, visit http://trafodion.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/Trafodion

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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 680 individual Members and 6,300 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, Union Investment, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Trafodion", "Apache Trafodion", "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.

# # #

Forest Hill, MD —28 November 2017— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Impala™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Impala is a modern, high-performance analytic database for Apache Hadoop. The massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL query engine allows for analytical queries on data stored on-premises (in HDFS or Apache Kudu) or in Cloud object storage via SQL or business intelligence tools without having to migrate data sets into specialized systems or proprietary formats.

"The Impala project has grown a lot since we entered incubation in December 2015," said Jim Apple, Vice President of Apache Impala. "With the help of our mentors and the Incubator, we have grown as a community and adopted the Apache Way, all while the Impala contributors have helped make Impala more stable and performant."

In addition to using the same unified storage platform as other Hadoop components, Impala also uses the same metadata, SQL syntax (Apache Hive SQL), ODBC driver, and user interface (Impala query UI in Hue) as Hive. This provides a familiar and unified platform for real-time or batch-oriented queries. Impala provides:

• A familiar SQL interface that data scientists and analysts already know;
• The ability to query high volumes of data (Big Data) in Apache Hadoop;
• Distributed queries in a cluster environment, for convenient scaling and to make use of cost-effective commodity hardware;
• The ability to share data files between different components with no copy or export/import step; for example, to write with Apache Pig, transform with Hive and query with Impala. Impala can read from and write to Hive tables, enabling simple data interchange using Impala for analytics on Hive-produced data; and
• A single system for big data processing and analytics, so customers can avoid costly modeling and ETL just for analytics.

Impala was inspired by Google's F1 database, which also separates query processing from storage management. It was originally released in 2012 and entered the Apache Incubator in December 2015. The project has had four releases during its incubation process.

"In 2011, we started development of Impala in order to make state-of-the-art SQL analytics available to the user community as open-source technology," said Marcel Kornacker, original founder of the Impala project. "The graduation to an Apache Top-Level Project is a recognition of the exceptional developer community that stands behind this project."

Apache Impala is deployed across a number of industries such as financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications, and is in use at companies that include Caterpillar, Cox Automotive, Jobrapido, Marketing Associates, the New York Stock Exchange, phData, and Quest Diagnostics. In addition, Impala is shipped by Cloudera, MapR, and Oracle.

"Apache Impala is our interactive SQL tool of choice. Over 30 phData customers have it deployed to production," said Brock Noland, Chief Architect at phData. "Combined with Apache Kudu for real-time storage, Impala has made architecting IoT and Data Warehousing use-cases dead simple. We can deploy more production use-cases with fewer people, delivering increased value to our customers. We're excited to see Impala graduate to a top-level project and look forward to contributing to its success."

"We use Apache Impala to boost performance of our SQL queries against our data lake," said Matteo Coloberti, Head of Analytics at Jobrapido. "Impala is an incredible service that gives us impressive performance on queries."

"We used to distribute Microsoft Excel reports to clients every one or two days but now they can search on their own by customer, sales deal, or even service type," said Andy Frey, CTO of Marketing Associates. "Apache Impala is used to query millions of rows to identify specific records that match the clients' criteria. We've even given clients a 'Query Hadoop' option that allows them to create simple SQL statements and query Hadoop directly via Impala. We're able to offer a faster, richer, and more accurate selection of services without the labor or latency concerns that we used to have."

"The Apache Impala community is growing, and we welcome new contributors to join in our efforts in our code, documentation, issue tracker, and discussion forums," added Apple.

Catch Apache Impala in action at Not Another Big Data Conference, taking place 12 December 2017 in Palo Alto, CA.

Apache Impala 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 Impala, visit http://impala.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheImpala

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 680 individual Members and 6,300 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSIGMA, ODPi, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Impala", "Apache Impala", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Kudu", "Apache Kudu", "Pig", "Apache Pig", 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.

# # #

Apache RocketMQ is an Open Source distributed messaging and streaming Big Data platform with low latency, high performance and reliability, trillion-level capacity and flexible scalability.

"I am very excited to see Apache RocketMQ as a Top-Level Project and I would like to thank our mentors for all their help, the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee for its advice and guidance, everyone in the RocketMQ community, and Alibaba for publishing the research upon which RocketMQ is based," said Xiaorui Wang, Vice President of Apache RocketMQ. "During the incubation process, the RocketMQ community worked very hard to develop high-quality distributed software for messaging and streaming, in an open and inclusive manner in accordance with the Apache Way."

RocketMQ originated at Alibaba in 2012, and, after handling 1.2 trillion concurrent online message transmissions in the Alibaba Nov. 11th Global Shopping Festival, was donated to the Apache Incubator in November 2016. Apache RocketMQ v4.0.0 was released in February 2017.

As a distributed messaging engine, RocketMQ features include:

• Low latency; more than 99.6% response latency within 1 millisecond under high pressure;
• Finance-oriented, high availability with tracking and auditing features;
• Industry-sustainable, trillion-level message capacity guaranteed;
• Vendor-neutral, support multiple messaging protocols like JMS and OpenMessaging;
• Big Data friendly, batch transferring with versatile integration for flooding throughput; and
• Massive accumulation, given sufficient disk space, accumulate messages without performance loss.
  
  

"RocketMQ was conceived from the outset as an open-source distributed messaging and streaming platform with low latency, high performance and reliability, trillion-level capacity and flexible scalability," said Von Gosling, original co-creator of RocketMQ and Chief Architect of Aliware MQ at Alibaba Group. "It has been great to witness the growth of the RocketMQ community and codebase as an ASF incubating project, and I look forward to this continuing as a Top-Level Project. Today, more than 100 companies are using Apache RocketMQ, with more feedback coming from the community. According to our data, more than 80% of the project's contributions are from outside the donator Alibaba Group."

In addition to Alibaba Group, Apache RocketMQ is in use at hundreds of companies and research/educational institutions that include Didi Chuxing, S.F. Express, WeBank, Peking University, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, among others.

"Graduation from the Incubator marks an important milestone for the RocketMQ project," said Bruce Snyder, Apache RocketMQ Incubator Mentor and Director of Software Development at SAP Hybris. "This is recognition of the focus and hard work of the project members to learn The Apache Way and drive community around RocketMQ. I am honored to have helped guide the project to a successful graduation."

"At Didi, we have used Apache RocketMQ as storage engine to build MessageQueue service. Based on high availability and high performance of RocketMQ we provide high-quality service," said Neil Qi, Architect at Didi Chuxing. "I believe RocketMQ will become the best MessageQueue project in future."

"New participants are more than welcome to join the project, To serve the community better, we created and maintained two repositories, one as our kernel version and the other one is for community contributions. The community contributed some integrated projects with some other Apache TLPs like Apache Storm, Apache Ignite, Apache Spark and Apache Flume," said Xinyu "yukon" Zhou, member of the Apache RocketMQ Project Management Committee. "We enthusiastically look forward to working together with all contributors to Apache RocketMQ in order to advance the state-of-the-art distributed messaging engine."

Availability and Oversight
Apache RocketMQ 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 RocketMQ, visit http://rocketmq.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheRocketMQ

The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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/

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "RocketMQ", "Apache RocketMQ", 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.

# # #

Big Data machine-learning library used for scalable in-database analytics

Forest Hill, MD –22 August 2017– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® MADlib™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache MADlib is a comprehensive library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides parallel implementations of machine learning, graph, mathematical and statistical methods for structured and unstructured data.

"Graduating as a Top-Level Project is a very important milestone for Apache MADlib," said Aaron Feng, Vice President of Apache MADlib. "During the incubation process, the MADlib community worked very hard to develop high quality software for in-database analytics, in an open and inclusive manner in accordance with the Apache Way."

MADlib grew out of discussions between database engine developers, data scientists, IT architects and academics interested in new approaches to scalable, sophisticated in-database analytics. These discussions were written up in a paper from VLDB 2009 [1] that coined the term "MAD Skills" for data analysis. The MADlib software project began the following year as a collaboration between researchers at UC Berkeley and engineers and computer scientists at Pivotal (formerly EMC/Greenplum). In September 2015, MADlib joined the ASF community as an incubating project.

MADlib is deployed on a wide variety of industry and academic projects across many different verticals, including automotive, consumer, finance, government, healthcare, and telecommunications.

"MADlib was conceived from the outset as an open-source meeting ground for software developers, computing researchers and data scientists to collaborate on scalable, in-database machine learning and statistics," said Joe Hellerstein, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Trifacta, and one of the original authors of MADlib. "It has been great to witness the growth of the MADlib community and codebase as an ASF incubating project, and I look forward to this continuing as a Top-Level Project."

"At Pivotal, we have seen our customers successfully deploy MADlib on large scale data science projects across a wide variety of industry verticals," said Elisabeth Hendrickson, Vice President, R&D for Data at Pivotal. "As MADlib graduates to a Top-Level Project at the ASF, we anticipate increased adoption in the enterprise given the mature level of the codebase and the active developer community."

"The potential of the Apache MADlib project is unbounded," said Jim Jagielski, Vice Chairman of the ASF. "The ability to perform in-depth and detailed analytics, on both structured and unstructured data, using SQL enables MADlib to be applicable in scenarios where others simply can't compete. As not only interest in, but real-world usage of, machine learning becomes common place, MADlib joins the growing roster of Apache projects that define innovation."

"Apache MADlib is a great example of the diversity at Apache," said Ted Dunning, Apache MADlib Incubator Mentor and Member of the ASF Board of Directors. "MADlib does state-of-the-art machine learning, but does as an inherent part of a database. This is a radical approach that can provide important design flexibility. I am excited to see MADlib become a fully fledged project at Apache."

"New participants are more than welcome to join the project," added Feng. "We enthusiastically look forward to working together with all contributors to Apache MADlib in order to advance the state-of-the-art of scale-out data science tools."

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687576

Availability and Oversight
Apache MADlib 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 MADlib, visit http://madlib.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheMADlib

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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 650 individual Members and 6,200 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, ODPi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "MADlib", "Apache MADlib", 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.

# # #

Open Source Big Data machine learning platform in use at Cadent Technology and IBM Watson Health, among other organizations.

Forest Hill, MD –31 May 2017– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® SystemML™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache SystemML is a machine learning platform optimal for Big Data that provides declarative, large-scale machine learning and deep learning. SystemML can be run on top of Apache Spark, where it automatically scales data, line by line, to determine whether code should be run on the driver or an Apache Spark cluster.

"Today, the machine learning revolution is leading to thousands of life-altering innovations such as self-driving cars and computers that detect cancer," said Deron Eriksson, Vice President of Apache SystemML. "Apache SystemML enables and simplifies this process by executing optimized high-level algorithms on Big Data using proven technologies such as Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop MapReduce."

The core of Apache SystemML has been created from the ground up with the following design principles in mind: 

• Performance and Scalability, as SystemML scales up on single nodes, and scales out on large clusters using Apache Spark or Apache Hadoop;
• "Designed for data scientists", enabling data scientists to develop algorithms in a system with a strong foundation in linear algebra and statistical functions; and 
• Cost-based optimization for scalable execution plans, that significantly shortens and simplifies the development and deployment cycle of algorithms for varying data characteristics and system configurations.

Using Apache SystemML, data scientists are able to implement algorithms using high-level language concepts without knowledge of distributed programming. Depending on data characteristics such as data size/shape and data sparsity (dense/sparse), and cluster characteristics such as cluster size and memory configurations, SystemML's cost-based optimizing compiler automatically generates hybrid runtime execution plans that are composed of single-node and distributed operations on Apache Spark or Apache Hadoop clusters for best performance.

"SystemML allows Cadent to implement advanced numerical programming methods in Apache Spark, empowering us to leverage specialized algorithms in our predictive analysis software," said Michael Zargham, Chief Scientist at Cadent Technology.

"SystemML is like SQL for Machine Learning, it enables Data Scientists to concentrate on the problem at hand, working in a high-level script language like R, and all the optimizations and rewrites are handled by the very powerful SystemML optimizer that considers data and available resources to produce the best execution plan for the application," said Luciano Resende, Architect at the IBM Spark Technology Center and Apache SystemML Incubator Mentor.

"IBM Watson Health VBC is using Apache SystemML on Apache Spark to build risk models on a very large EHR data set to predict emergency department visits," said Steve Beier, Vice President of Value Based Care Platform and Analytics at IBM Watson Health. "The models identify high-risk patients so that they can be targeted with preemptive strategies, thus potentially reducing care costs while at the same time leading to optimal outcomes for patients."

SystemML originated at IBM Research - Almaden in 2010, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in November 2015. SystemML initiated compressed linear algebra research, a differentiating feature in SystemML, which received the VLDB 2016 Best Paper.

"The Apache Incubator is all about open collaboration and communication and was invaluable for everyone involved in SystemML," added Eriksson. "The Apache SystemML community sincerely encourages everyone interested in machine learning and deep learning to help build our community around this revolutionary technology."

Catch Apache SystemML in action at the Big Data Developers Silicon Valley MeetUp on 8 June 2017 in San Francisco, CA.

Availability and Oversight
Apache SystemML 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 SystemML, visit http://systemml.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheSystemML

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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 620 individual Members and 6,000 Committers 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, ODPi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit https://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "SystemML", "Apache SystemML", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Spark", "Apache Spark", 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.

# # #

Forest Hill, MD —10 January 2017— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Eagle™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Eagle is an Open Source monitoring and alerting solution for instantly identifying security and performance issues on Big Data platforms such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and more.

"We are proud to complete the incubation process and graduate as an Apache Top-Level Project," said Edward Zhang, Vice President of Apache Eagle. "The community is actively improving product coverage for analyzing various performance and security issues in large Hadoop clusters."

Eagle was first developed at eBay to solve the monitoring problem for a large scale Hadoop cluster. The eBay team soon realized it would be useful to the whole community, and submitted the project to the Apache Incubator in October 2015. Since then, the project gained a lot of attraction from various developers and organizations for its broad usage scenarios, such as system/service monitoring, application performance monitoring, and security breach detection.

Apache Eagle features include:

• Highly extensible - Apache Eagle builds its core framework around the application concept; the application itself includes the logic for monitoring source data collection, pre-processing and normalization. Developers can easily develop out-of-box monitoring applications using Eagle's application framework, and deploy into Eagle.
• Scalable - the project’s fundamental runtime is based on proven Big Data technologies, and applies a scalable core to make it adaptive according to the throughput of the data stream as well as the number of monitored applications.
• Real-time - provides state-of-the-art alert engine to identify security breaches and performance issues.
• Dynamic - users can freely enable or disable a monitoring application and dynamically change their alert policies without any impact to the underlying runtime.

"It is exciting to see increasing deployments of Apache Eagle, along with great use cases and contributions back to the project," added Zhang.

"Apache Eagle is a highly scalable and extensible technology platform to support the ever growing needs of intelligent monitoring and alerting in a massively distributed computing environment," said Debashis Saha, CTO and EVP at Jiff Inc. "As the founding executive sponsor of this project at eBay, I am proud to see the community continue to expand the capabilities by supporting complex and diverse use cases for monitoring in security, infrastructure, networking and distributed services in Apache Eagle. Congratulations to the team and the community in graduating to a Apache top level project."

"As a leader in data-centric security with a focus on cloud and Big Data technologies, Dataguise is proud to be part of the Eagle committers group. DgSecure Monitor, our sensitivity-aware monitoring product, uses Apache Eagle as the core engine," said Subra Ramesh, VP of Products and Engineering at Dataguise Inc. "Apache Eagle's flexible architecture, proven scalability, and  cutting-edge design, have enabled DgSecure Monitor to be a highly responsive and scalable solution for both on-premises and cloud deployments. We look forward to continued involvement with Eagle as it has now become a top-level Apache project."

"We have been using Apache Eagle for about a year, and are very happy to see it graduate to a Top-Level Project. Apache Eagle and its low latency real-time alert engine can help us easily identify security and performance issues instantly on Hadoop platform," said Anson Zhong, Senior Vice President of Tech Department at YHD.com. "In addition, Eagle's architecture is highly extensible. We are looking forward to using it in real time risk management system."

"Apache Eagle is a great monitoring and alerting solution designed for large-scale distributed environment," said Chad Chun, Director of Analytics Data Infrastructure at eBay. "It was originally intended for security monitoring and quickly become a generic solution for allowing domain experts to create their own monitoring applications on top of Eagle. This is a wonderful design for easily leveraging the power of community to create and share applications. Looking forward to the tremendous adoption in the industry."

"The Apache Eagle community has done a tremendous job throughout the incubation process, and I'm thrilled to see it graduate to a Top-Level Project," said P. Taylor Goetz, ASF Member and Apache Eagle Project Mangement Committee member. "Eagle fills a very important role in providing top-notch security and performance monitoring and alerting for Big Data deployments. The Eagle project has built a robust, sustainable community and demonstrated a firm understanding of the Apache Way. I look forward to further innovation as the Eagle community marks this important milestone."

"It is great to see Apache Eagle graduate to a Top Level Project within a year of time," said Seshu Adunuthula, Senior Director of Data Platforms at eBay. "It is a great product with unique position to fill the gap of monitoring and alerting large-scale distributed computing environment which is well architected to allow communities to easily implement monitoring and alerting applications on different technical domains such as networking and database clusters.  I would love to see the community to grow fast in the next coming years!"

The project welcomes contributions and community participation through mailing lists, Slack channel, face-to-face Meetups, and other events.

Apache Eagle 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 project updates, downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Eagle, visit http://eagle.apache.org and @TheApacheEagle.

The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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

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 620 individual Members and 5,900 Committers 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, OPDi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Eagle", "Apache Eagle", "Apache Hadoop", "Hadoop", "Apache Spark", "Spark", 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.

I've been involved in The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) since 2003. I was using Apache Tomcat at work and I hit a problem that needed a new feature to be implemented. There was already an enhancement request in Bugzilla so I submitted a patch. After some re-work by the project committers, the patch was applied and the feature available in the next release. I enjoy problem solving, so I started to take a look at the other open Tomcat bug reports and my involvement grew from there to include Apache Commons, the Infrastructure Team, the Security Team and, most recently, the Board of Directors to which I was elected in March 2016.

Apache Tomcat has always been at the heart of my involvement and is where I spend most of my time. Tomcat started with a donation to the ASF by Sun in 1999 and, some seven major versions later, the project continues to be very successful. A significant part that success is due to the involvement of a wide range of individuals from different companies. The reason those companies are happy co-operating on Tomcat is because of the importance the ASF places on project independence.

There are many aspects to project independence but, for me, the most important is that committers and Project Management Committee (PMC) members contribute to the project as individuals and do so with the intention of doing what is best for the community as a whole. Some committers contribute in their free time – I did for the first five years or so with Tomcat – and some are allowed /directed to spend time contributing to Apache projects by their employer. However, those committers contributing on their employer's time still need to act in the best interests of the community rather than the best interest of their employer.

To give a specific example, my employer has a product that is built around Apache Tomcat. The sales folks at my employer asked if I could add a feature to this product. The problem was that this feature required access to low-level Tomcat internals in order to implement it effectively. For this to be possible, I would have needed to make some ugly API changes to Tomcat to provide the integration points required. Rather than try and push those changes through, I persuaded my employer that it would better to donate the entire feature to the Apache Tomcat project.

This feature also demonstrates other important elements of a successful ASF project: the ability to make decisions in public and always aiming to achieve community consensus with those decisions. As the development of this new feature progressed, the design evolved as the community reviewed the commits and suggested improvements. This isn't always the quickest way of working but the quality of the end result – both technically but more importantly in terms of community health - more than makes up for that.

The perception of project independence is as important as projects actually being independent. It is a key factor in many projects choosing the ASF as their home so projects need to ensure that the perception agrees with reality.

Things can and do go wrong. With 350 projects it is pretty much a given that there will be a handful of ongoing issues at any given time. For example, there might be an attempt to push a project in a particular direction or to suggest that some external entity controls / leads / manages the project. Typically these are self-corrected by the PMC. Sometimes the PMC needs help to resolve the issue e.g. from V.P. Brand Management or possibly the ASF Board.

Being a board member is often viewed as more significant than it is. I have no more status in Apache Tomcat, Apache Commons or any other project as a board member than I did before my election to the board. I can still have bad ideas and my fellow community members still point it out when it happens. I don't get to always have my way just because I am board member. It is the board as a whole, rather than the individual board members, whose voice carries significant weight. It is fairly rare for any board member to speak on behalf of the board. To give that some context, I've probably done it no more than once a month since joining the board. It is sufficiently rare that board members always include an explicit "on behalf of the board" when speaking for the board rather than as an individual. Sometimes this point isn't appreciated and the views of an individual board member are incorrectly taken to be the views of the board.

The ASF board is also very different to a corporate board. The board manages the Foundation but it is the PMC that manages the project and sets the direction. The board has no role in the technical direction of a project. The board has responsibility for corporate governance, finance, legal etc., but its primary role is monitoring, mentoring and coaching our project communities to help keep them healthy. As part of this, the board reviews all projects on a regular basis. Newly graduated projects are reviewed monthly for typically 3 months before moving to quarterly reviews. The project V.P. (PMC Chair) is an important part of this. They are the eyes and ears of the board. While the board will look for warning signs as part of its regular review, the V.P. has much more in depth knowledge of the project and can flag specific issues early. Where issues are identified, the aim is to get the PMC to self-correct. The board will provide mentoring / coaching / guidance as necessary but it will be the PMC members who do the work to correct the issue.

As an example of the board working with a PMC, earlier this year the V.P. for a particular project became unavailable. The board became concerned because the regular reports were not being produced for the project. In this instance, no-else on the PMC had experience of being a project V.P so the board worked with the PMC to identify a new V.P. and to then mentor the new V.P. as they found their way in their new role.

For the last 17 years, the ASF has provided a home for a large and diverse set of open source projects. Key to this success has been the importance the ASF places on project independence as part of the Apache Way. By continuing to adhere to the principles of the Apache Way, I am confident that the ASF will continue to be successful for another 17 years and a long way beyond.

Forest Hill, MD —21 November 2016— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Geode™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Geode is an Open Source in-memory data grid that provides transactional data management for scale-out applications needing low latency response times during high concurrent processing.

"Graduating as a Top-Level Project marks an important milestone for Apache Geode," said Mark Bretl, Vice President of Apache Geode. "Our community is proud to champion a diverse group of developers and users whose support has helped Geode reach a sustainable level of maturity."

The Geode codebase was originally developed by Gemstone Systems in 2002. GemFire, the original commercial distribution of Geode, was first widely adopted by the financial sector as the transactional, low-latency data engine used in Wall Street trading platforms. Pivotal®, which owns the GemFire technology, submitted the Geode code to the Apache Incubator in April 2015.

"We are excited to see Geode graduate from the Apache Incubator to a Top-Level Project. It's quite a feat to transform a mature commercial product into a widely adopted open source project," said Elisabeth Hendrickson, VP of Big Data R&D at Pivotal. "The committers in Geode have worked hard at building community and making the project accessible to newcomers, paving the way for developers everywhere to benefit from a proven in memory data grid technology."

Since entering the Apache Incubator, the project has had significant increases in the number of independent developers contributing to the code, as well as organizations incorporating Apache Geode in their deployments and solutions. Today, over 600 enterprises use the technology behind Apache Geode for high-scale business applications that must meet low latency and 24x7 availability requirements, such as financial risk analysis systems, high volume eCommerce Websites, and transportation & logistics management.

"zData has been deploying big solutions with the technology of Apache Geode well before it became open source software. We look forward to helping more of our customers enjoy the speed, reliability, and scale that Apache Geode brings to any application architecture."

-- Dillon Woods, CTO, zData Inc.

"Apache Geode is an important component of Capgemini's Business Data Lake and fast reacting business scale out analytics solutions. Capgemini congratulates the Apache Geode community on becoming a top level project in The Apache Software Foundation." 

-- Steve Jones, Global Vice President, Big Data, Capgemini

"Apache Apex provides direct support for Apache Geode. Geode helps Apex deployments by providing fast, fault-tolerant storage and query support for stream processing data. Data Torrent welcomes Apache Geode as a peer project of Apache Apex".

--Amol Kekre, CTO at Data Torrent

"Apache Geode is an important component of Ampool Active Data Store. It provides scale-out in-memory processing with transactional consistency. We've been enthusiastic users of Apache Geode since its beginning, and look forward to this next phase".

-- Milind Bhandarkar, CEO at Ampool

"Through the incubation process we have worked to create an open and collaborative community for developers and users to work together, and look forward to seeing new contributions, feedback, bug reports, and subscribers to the Geode email lists," added Bretl.

The Apache Geode project welcomes contributions and community participation through mailing lists, face-to-face MeetUps, Geode Clubhouse online, and other events such as the Apache: Big Data conference series.

Apache Geode 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 project updates, downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache Geode, visit http://geode.apache.org/ and @ApacheGeode.

The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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/

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 620 individual Members and 5,500 Committers 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, OPDi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Geode", "Apache Geode", 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.

Forest Hill, MD –27 July 2016– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache® Twill™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Twill is an abstraction over Apache Hadoop® YARN that reduces the complexity of developing distributed Hadoop applications, allowing developers to focus more on their application logic.

"The Twill community is excited to graduate from the Apache Incubator to a Top-Level Project," said Terence Yim, Vice President of Apache Twill and Software Engineer at Cask. "We are proud of the innovation, creativity and simplicity Twill demonstrates. We are also very excited to bring a technology so versatile in Hadoop into the hands of every developer in the industry."

Apache Twill provides rich built-in features for common distributed applications for development, deployment, and management, greatly easing Hadoop cluster operation and administration.

"Enterprises use big data technologies - and specifically Hadoop - to drive more value," said Patrick Hunt, member of the Apache Software Foundation and Senior Software Engineer at Cloudera. "Apache Twill helps streamline and reduce complexity of developing distributed applications and its graduation to an Apache Top-Level Project means more people will be able to take advantage of Apache Hadoop YARN more easily."

"This is an exciting and major milestone for Apache Twill," said Keith Turner, member of the Apache Fluo (incubating) Project Management Committee, which used Twill in the development of Fluo, an Open Source project that makes it possible to update the results of a large-scale computation, index, or analytic as new data is discovered. "Early in development, we knew we needed a standard way to launch Fluo across a cluster, and we found Twill. With Twill, we quickly and easily had Fluo running across many nodes on a cluster." 

Apache Twill is in production by several organizations across various industries, easing distributed Hadoop application development and deployment.

Twill originated at Cask in early 2013. After 7 major releases, the project was submitted to the Apache Incubator in November of 2013.

"Apache Twill has come a long way through The Apache Software Foundation, and we're thrilled it has become an ASF Top-Level Project," said Nitin Motgi, CTO of Cask. "Apache Twill has become a key component behind the Cask Data Application Platform (CDAP), using YARN containers and Java threads as the processing abstraction. CDAP is an Open Source integration and application platform that makes it easy for developers and organizations to quickly build, deploy and manage data applications on Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark."

"The Apache Twill community worked extremely well within the incubator environment, developing and collaborating openly to follow The Apache Way," said Henry Saputra, ASF Member and member of the Apache Twill Project Management Committee. "There is a tremendous demand for effective APIs and virtualization for developing big data applications and Apache Twill fills that need perfectly. We’re looking forward to continuing the journey with Apache Twill as a Top-Level Project."

Catch Apache Twill in action at:

• JavaOne, 18-22 September 2016 in San Francisco
• Strata+Hadoop World, 27-29 September 2016 in New York City

Apache Twill 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 Twill, visit http://twill.apache.org/ and follow @ApacheTwill. 

The Apache Incubator is the 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 wishing to join the ASF enter 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/

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 550 individual Members and 5,300 Committers 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 Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Confluent, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, OPDi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

©The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Twill", "Apache Twill", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop YARN", "Spark", "Apache Spark", 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.

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