The Apache Software Foundation
Blogging in Action.

This week, we are excited to launch the 2020 ASF Community Survey, with which we will gather scientific data that allows us to understand our community better, both in its demographic composition, and also in collaboration styles and preferences. We want to find areas where we can continue to do great work and others where we need to provide more support so that our projects can keep growing healthy and diverse. This joint effort was long overdue: our last survey of this kind was implemented in 2016 [1], which means that all the information we currently have about our communities is outdated. 

For this new version of the survey, we have hired Bitergia to design it, a company expert in analysing open source communities and other types of software development teams. They have experience in this type of surveys and research in open source communities. Among other studies, their previous work includes an analysis in gender diversity in technical contributions for OpenStack [2]. The 2020 ASF Community Survey is the first part of a two-stage research. The second part consists of interviews with people who have contributed to the ASF, in order to assess their experience. We'll share more on this second part of the project soon. 

This survey and research are part of the ASF efforts to build a more equitable, inclusive and diverse community. They are run by the Vice Presidency of Diversity and Inclusion, a team formed last May. We'll share a broader update about this group in January.

If you have an apache.org email address you will receive an email by Thursday, Dec 5 at 3PM PST, with a link to the survey. Please take 15 minutes to complete it. If you didn't receive the email or you do not have an apache.org email address, please use this link to complete the survey: 

We are looking to hear from everyone in our community: from users and contributors, to committers and PMCs. Everyone's voice matters. 

Find more information about the 2020 ASF Community Survey on its page on Confluence [3], including the privacy policy governing this initiative. If you are part of our community, either as a user, contributor, or both, your participation is paramount to the success of this project! Please consider filling out the survey, and share this blog on social media, send it to your fellow Apache contributors. As individuals form the Apache community, your opinion matters: we need to hear your voice.

Links

[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/ASF+Committer+Diversity+Survey+-+2016
[2] https://blog.bitergia.com/tag/openstack/
[3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/EDI/Launch+Plan+-+The+2020+ASF+Community+Survey

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Wakefield, MA —20 May 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® Dubbo™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Dubbo is a high-performance, Java based RPC (remote procedure call) framework. The project was originally developed at Alibaba and open-sourced in 2011, and entered the Apache Incubator in February 2018.

"This day is not only the success of Apache Dubbo project itself, but also another success of The Apache Way," said Ian Luo, Vice President of Apache Dubbo. "Back to the time when Dubbo started to incubate at The Apache Software Foundation, there was a small number of initial committers to the project, but today the number of the Dubbo committers has increased by five times, and we are proud of having far more contributors in this project by now. It is indeed a great journey."

The Dubbo framework specifies the methods that can be called remotely across distributed and microservice systems. Its primary functionalities are: interface based remote call; fault tolerance and load balancing; and automatic service registration and discovery. Features include:

• Transparent interface based RPC – provides high performance interface based RPC, which is transparent to users.
  
  
• Intelligent load balancing – supports multiple load balancing strategies out of the box, which perceives downstream service status to reduce overall latency and improve system throughput.
  
  
• Automatic service registration and discovery – supports multiple service registries that can detect service online/offline instantly.
  
  
• High extensibility – micro-kernel and plugin design ensures that it can easily be extended by third party implementation across core features like protocol, transport, and serialization.
  
  
• Runtime traffic routing – can be configured at runtime so that traffic can be routed according to different rules, which makes it easy to support features such as blue-green deployment, data center aware routing, etc.
  
  
• Visualized service governance – provides rich tools for service governance and maintenance such as querying service metadata, health status, and statistics.

Apache Dubbo is in use at more than 150 companies, including Alibaba Group, China Life, China Telecom, Dangdang, Didi Chuxing, Haier, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, NetEase, Qunar, and Youzan, among others.

"Congratulations to Dubbo for graduating from the Apache Incubator! Apache Dubbo, as a high-performance service governance framework, plays a crucial role in Didi's evolution of technical architecture," said Donghai Shi, Senior Technical Director at Didi Chuxing. "With the rapid business growth, our application services and business logic grows more and more complicated, we have been facing more and more challenges in R&D efficiency and business stability. Many thanks to Apache Dubbo, which serves as a strong support for our service governance. Based on Apache Dubbo's service governance framework, we can be more practical and determined in building business with microservices."

"Congratulations on Dubbo's promotion to an Apache Top-Level Project. As a core component of service, Dubbo has a profound impact and is one of the best choices for service architecture," said Xiaofan Yu, Architecture of NetEase Cloud Music. "We have learned a lot from Dubbo's design and implementation. I believe that it can develop in a more quick and stable way after graduation and become the cornerstone of future microservice architecture."

“Congratulations to Dubbo for becoming an Apache Top-Level Project," said Ruimin Jin, Technical Director at Youzan Cloud. "Youzan's large-scale microservice cluster is built on Apache Dubbo. Dubbo's outstanding features, flexible design, and extensive experience in the community has helped us to build distributed systems quickly. In the past three years, we have done a lot of service governance based on Dubbo and achieved very good business results. I hope that Apache Dubbo will have more achievements in multi-language in the future, and the Open Source community can also contribute more plugins to Dubbo."

"Qunar.com first chose Apache Dubbo as service infrastructure in 2012 --doing so helped us take fewer detours in the framework selection when we deployed it at scale," said Zhaohui Yu, Former Senior Director, Infrastructure Department, Qunar.com. "Our team was happy to participate in the community by fixing bugs and contributing new features over the years. Congratulations to Dubbo for graduating as an Apache Top-Level Project: it is a great honor for all Dubbo users."

"Congratulations to Dubbo graduating from the Apache Incubator. As a very popular SOA framework, Apache Dubbo forms part of our infrastructure layer to support almost all different business units within Guazi.com," said Haozhi Liu, Principal Architect at Guazi.com. "It also plays an increasingly important role along with our technical transition from PHP to Java. Furthermore, during our process of adopting Apache Dubbo, both the community and Project Management Committee have been very helpful. We truly believe that with this strong community support, Apache Dubbo project will continue to be successful in the future."

"It's both thrilling and an honor to participate in the development of Apache Dubbo," added Luo. "Our journey continues through the excellent efforts of the greater Apache Dubbo community. We welcome additional contributions to the source code, features, documentation, and discussions on the mailing list."

Catch Apache Dubbo in action at the Apache Dubbo MeetUp series (26 May/Beijing, 6 July/Shenzhen, and 17 August/Shanghai), ApacheCon North America (9-12 September/Las Vegas), and ApacheCon Europe (22-24 October/Berlin).

Apache Dubbo 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 Dubbo, visit http://dubbo.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheDubbo

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 that provide $20B+ worth of Apache Open Source software to the public at 100% no cost. Through the ASF's merit-based 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 billions 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", "Dubbo", "Apache Dubbo", 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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Wakefield, MA —24 April 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^® SkyWalking™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache SkyWalking is an application performance monitor (APM) tool that provides an automatic, highly efficient way to instrument microservices, cloud native, and container-based applications. The project was originally developed in 2015, and entered the Apache Incubator in December 2017.

"This is a special day for the SkyWalking project and its community. We thank our mentors, contributors, and the Apache Incubator for helping us achieve this goal," said Sheng Wu, Vice President of Apache SkyWalking. "The original agenda behind SkyWalking was to help newcomers understand what is distributed tracing, and the community has grown bigger and stronger since we entered the Apache Incubator. Through The Apache Way, SkyWalking has a very active and diverse community, is used by over 70 companies, and has over 100 source contributors from dozens of different organizations."

Apache SkyWalking provides tracing, service mesh telemetry analysis, metric aggregation and visualization for the distributed system. The project landscape has expanded from a pure tracing system, to an observability analysis platform, and application performance management/monitoring system. Features include:

• Distributed tracing-based APM: 100% traces collected with low payload for original system;
• Cloud-native friendly: observe distributed system powered by service mesh, Istio and Envoy;
• Automated source code change: multiple language agents provided, especially with auto instrumentation supported, in Java, .NET and Nodejs;
• Easy to operate: doesn’t require Big Data in monitoring large scale distributed system; and
• Advanced visualization: used in traces, metrics and topology map.

Apache SkyWalking is in use at dozens of organizations that include 5i5j Group, Alibaba, autohome.com, China Eastern Airlines, China Merchants Bank, Daocloud, dangdang.com, guazi.com, Huawei, ke.com, iFLYTEK, primeton.com, Sinolink Securities, tetrate.io, tuhu.cn, tuya.com, WeBank, Yonghui Superstores, youzan.com, and more.

"Instrumentation is unquestionably the most time-consuming part of establishing a distributed tracing solution into an existing platform. I had the chance to code with some of the SkyWalking community earlier on and could see the quality being invested back then," said Mick Semb Wever, ASF Member and Apache SkyWalking Incubating Mentor. "When they were looking for mentors and a champion to help them create a proposal to become an Apache project, I was excited at the opportunity to help bring the project to the Apache Incubator, and was pleasantly surprised to see how prepared, and ASF-like, the SkyWalking community and project had already become. As was the case with Apache Kylin, SkyWalking has not only been a model project during the incubation process, they have also become ambassadors on open development The Apache Way to the greater Open Source community in China. Congratulations on graduating as an Apache Top-Level Project."

"SkyWalking is one of the only Open Source tracing systems where usability and user interface have been a focus, something missing in most Open Source projects," said Jonah Kowall, CTO at Kentik, and former VP Research at Gartner. "Making tracing and APM more easily used by developers and operations team is a key goal which makes Apache Skywalking a project to watch."

"Apache SkyWalking has done a lot of work in spreading modern cloud native observability in China and across the world," said Chris Aniczszyk, CTO and COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "We are happy to see Apache SkyWalking become a TLP and look forward to their community growing and collaborating with CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, Jaeger and more."

"I hear regularly from users that observability is the most important feature they're getting out of their service mesh," said Zack Butcher, Core Contributor to Istio. "By integrating Apache SkyWalking with Istio, the SkyWalking team has brought their incredible tools for deeply understanding system behavior to the mesh. We've already seen great results, and I can't wait to see what further insights users unlock using Apache SkyWalking together with Istio to observe and manage their deployments."

"At WeBank, we use different banking architectures, from distributed architecture to Open Source technologies. We’ve built a messaging bus called WeMQ based on Apache RocketMQ that fully utilizes the benefits of messaging by implementing various messaging techniques in different scenarios, such as message exchanges, pub/sub and request/reply models," said Eason Chen, WeBank Tech Specialist, and Apache RocketMQ Contributor. "However, after adding different messaging services that are critical to our business, we realized there is a need for a universal visual traceable system for the distributed message to help us to diagnosis problem of applications. We believe Apache SkyWalking can address our current challenges, and we look forward to contributing to its efforts."

"I am very glad to see SkyWalking has been promoted as Apache Top-Level Project," said Lie Mao, Architect at China Eastern Airlines IT Solution Department. "Apache SkyWalking is integrated into the China Eastern Airlines microservice architecture support platform. SkyWalking provides practical features and visualization capabilities about topology map and distributed tracing, to help us understand the distributed system. I hope the Open Source community can contribute more plugins to Apache SkyWalking to enhance its role in the multi-language hybrid architecture."

"I found SkyWalking in 2017. In two years, it has grown very fast, and the community is very active," said DongXue Si, Senior Software Engineer at CloudWise Inc. "The project is adopted by many companies, and is attracting a lot of developers. Apache SkyWalking makes application performance monitoring easier and more convenient. I believe it will be better and better powered by its diversity community: Bless it."

"As early adopters of SkyWalking, we are very glad to see it graduate as an Apache Top-Level Project," said Liang Zhang, Architect at JD.com, Podling Project Management Committee member of Apache ShardingSphere (incubating), and former Architect at dangdang.com. "Dangdang.com adopted SkyWalking much earlier before it joined the Apache Incubator: we have witnessed its development, new features, and community growth. It is a very good example for Apache ShardingSphere (incubating). I look forward to our projects cooperating on observability in databases, and building a better Open Source ecosystem together."

"Congratulations to SkyWalking for becoming an Apache Top Level project," said Yuqi Zhou, Middleware Development Manager at Sinolink Securities Co. "Apache SkyWalking’s elegant design and good performance solves the our tracing and monitoring needs. Thanks to the Open Source community for bringing us such an awesome project: I wish it continued success."

"In helping enterprise customers transform their business application from traditional architecture to a Microservices architecture, one of the most important aspects of the microservices governance platform is its observability to obtain invocation relationships between components, as well as inside service itself, and to generate statistics based on these data, including SLA of services provided to the outside world," said Grissom Wang, Chief Architect at DaoCloud. "We surveyed a number of similar Open Source technologies and eventually chose Apache SkyWalking as one of the core components of DaoCloud Microservices platform because of its openness, extendibility, high performance, excellent code quality, active community, and forward-looking integration with Istio."

"Congrats SkyWalking being an Apache TLP," said Niangang Xu, co-founder of Yonghui Cloud Computing. "Apache SkyWalking helps us to improve the design of microservice, and has been enabling us to manage and observe a lot of distributed systems at scale!"

"SkyWalking is on its way to becoming a world wide Open Source project," added Wu. "We welcome everyone to participate on our mailing lists, GitHub, and Slack channels, and to learn more through our events, presentations, Website, and documents."

Catch Apache SkyWalking in action at SkyWalking DevCon (Shanghai; 11 May 2019), GIAC (Shenzhen; 21-23 June 2019), KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China (Shanghai; 25-26 June 2019), ApacheCon North America  (Las Vegas; 9-12 September 2019), and DevOps Stage (Kiev; 18-19 October 2019).

Apache SkyWalking 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 SkyWalking, visit http://skywalking.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ASFSkyWalking

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 that provide $20B+ worth of Apache Open Source software to the public at 100% no cost. Through the ASF's merit-based 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 billions 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", "SkyWalking", "Apache SkyWalking", "Kylin", "Apache Kylin", "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.

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"We build industrial IoT solutions and do edge computing in the industrial ecosystem, thus PLC connection is an important concern for us but no part of our core business," said Julian Feinauer, CEO at pragmatic industries GmbH. "As there were no open alternatives, we used our own home-made stack for PLC communication and regularly had issues with edge cases or bugs. We moved to Apache PLC4X about half a year ago and already see the payoff of the initial efforts. Since moving to PLC4X we see a massive performance boost, have connectors to more types of PLCs, and reached very good stability."

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.

As Open Source software continues to grow in importance, it seems appropriate to reflect upon the ongoing success of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as it approaches its 20th anniversary. The Apache Way of community-driven development continues to gain momentum despite the compounding challenges of building software in the greater Open Source ecosystem.

This approach, The Apache Way, was defined over 24 years ago by the original Apache Group, prior to the establishment of the Foundation. It has led to our success as a foundation and we believe it has been fundamental to the triumph of Open Source as a whole.

While The Apache Way has been refined over the years, it remains true to the original goals of transparent, community-driven collaboration in a vendor-neutral environment that is accessible to all.

The Apache Way defines Open Source in terms of both a legal and a social framework for collaboration. It helps others understand what makes Open Source powerful and how participants are expected to behave. In this post we will examine The Apache Way in the context of the Foundation's mission:

Let's dissect this mission statement. 

"Provide Software for the Public Good"

Key points in this section: 

• We produce software that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous
  
  
• Use of the software in any context does not reduce its availability to others
  
  
• Users and contributors have no committed responsibility to the foundation, our projects or our communities
  
  
• Use of a license that conforms to the Open Source Definition is necessary but not sufficient to deliver on our mission 
  
  

Investopedia defines a public good as "a product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to another individual, and from which no one is excluded." On the surface, this is a good definition for our use of the term. However, there is a nuance in our use. Our mission is not to produce "public goods" but to "provide software for the public good". 

To understand why this is important, one needs to think about what motivates the ASF to produce software that is a public good.

Open Source software can be digitally copied and reused in an unlimited number of ways. Every user can modify it for their specific needs. They can combine it with other software. They can design innovative new products and services using it and can make a living from the proceeds. This is all possible without impacting other people's use of the software. As such, the ASF produces software that can be used for the public good in many different ways.

To allow us to deliver on this part of the mission, it is critical that we adopt a license that uses the law to protect the software curated here at the Foundation. For us that license is the Apache License, Version 2. In addition, we adopt an inbound licensing policy that defines which licenses are allowable on software reused within Apache projects. This policy can be summarized as: 

• The license must meet the Open Source Definition (OSD).
  
  
• The license, as applied in practice, must not impose significant restrictions beyond those imposed by the Apache License 2.0.
  
  

This means that you can be assured that software curated by projects within The Apache Software Foundation is both a public good and for the public good. You can use Apache software for any purpose and you have no responsibility to the Foundation or the project to contribute back (though as addressed in the next section, it is often in your interests to do so). 

It is important to recognize that there are software projects out there that adopt our license but do not adopt our inbound licensing policy. Such projects may bring restrictions that are not covered by our license; therefore, it is important to carefully examine the licensing policies of these projects. Using the Apache License alone may not provide you with the same options a Foundation project provides. 

Apache projects are successful, in large part, because of our diligence with respect to clearly-defined licensing policies. Such diligence makes it much easier for downstream users to understand what they can and cannot do with Apache software. The Apache License is deliberately permissive to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in Open Source within the ASF or elsewhere. Modifications of our license are allowed, but modified licenses are neither the Apache License nor affiliated with or endorsed by The Apache Software Foundation. No modified license can be represented as such. Modified licenses that use the Apache name are strictly disallowed, as they are both confusing to users and undermine the Apache brand.

While we recognize that there are many ways to license software, whether Open Source or otherwise, we assert that only projects that use both our license (unmodified) and our inbound licensing policy truly follow and adhere to The Apache Way. 

While an OSD-approved license and associated policies are necessary for successful Open Source production, they are not sufficient. They provide a legal framework for the production of Open Source, but they do not provide a social framework, which brings us to the second sentence of our mission:

"The mission of the Apache Software Foundation is to provide software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many like-minded software project communities of individuals who choose to contribute to Apache projects."

"Like-Minded Software Project Communities of Individuals"

Key points in this section: 

• The Apache Way provides a governance model designed to create a social framework for collaboration
  
  
• The Apache Software Foundation develops communities, and those communities develop software
  
  
• ASF project communities develop and reuse software components that in turn may be reused in products
  
  
• Users of ASF software often build products and services using our software components
  
  
• Our model, and others like it, have produced some of the largest and longest-lived Open Source projects that have literally revolutionized the industry 

There is a lot packed into these few words. It is an understanding of these words that makes the difference between software that is under an Open Source license and software that reaches sustainability through The Apache Way. These words underscore the fact that the Foundation does not directly produce software. That's right, The Apache Software Foundation, with upwards of $8Bn of software code, does not directly produce software. Rather than focus on software, we focus on the creation of and support of collaborative communities; the software is an intentional by-product. 

Our like-minded project communities come together because they share common problems that can be addressed in software. As the saying goes, "a problem shared is a problem halved". By bringing together individuals with their unique ideas and skills, we break down barriers to collaboration. 

The Apache Way is carefully crafted to create a social structure for collaboration, which complements the legal framework discussed above. Where the legal framework ensures an equal right to use the software, The Apache Way ensures an equal ability to contribute to the software. This is critically important to the long term sustainability of Open Source software projects. This social structure for collaboration is missing from many non-Apache projects, yet a robust social structure is invariably a key component in long-term successful projects outside of the ASF.

The Apache Way is fully inclusive, open, transparent and consensus-based. It promotes vendor neutrality to prevent undue influence (or control) from a single company. It ensures that any individual with a valuable contribution is empowered, and it seeks to assure that a project remains sustainable despite inevitable changes in community membership over time.

Apache projects typically produce software components that can be combined with other software (of any license) in different ways to solve different problems. This provides plenty of opportunity for participants to collaborate within a given software project independent of their relationship outside the Foundation. This is very different from the idea of licensing your product as a whole under an Open Source license. Our model offers more opportunities for reuse which, in turn, increase the pool of individuals likely to contribute to the project.

In addition, our merit-based system seeks to ensure that as people come and go, for whatever reason, there is always someone to take their place. As a result, some ubiquitous Apache projects have existed for over 20 years and helped commercialize the World Wide Web; while dozens of newer projects have defined industry segments such as Big Data and IoT (Internet of Things). 

A core tenet of The Apache Way is "Community Over Code", which encapsulates our deep belief that a healthy community is a far higher priority than good code. A strong community can always rectify a problem with the code, whereas an unhealthy community will likely struggle to maintain a codebase in a sustainable manner. Healthy communities ensure the Foundation has the stability to thrive for the next 20 years and beyond. Apache projects do not have the problem of scaling that others, who focus only on the legal frameworks of Open Source, suffer from. If you look around at projects that have grown up alongside the Apache projects, you will see a similar focus on scaling the governance model. This is no accident. 

Why this is Important

Software is a critical part of any modern economy. It touches every part of every life in the developed world, and is increasingly transforming everyday life, from womb to grave, everywhere.

At The Apache Software Foundation, we believe that every developer has their personal motivations for building software. We celebrate their right to choose when and how they build their software, including their right to use a non-open license. 

We will not dictate what is best for developers or for the software industry.

We care about the provision of software that enables our users, our contributors, and the general public to decide what is best for them.

We welcome you to use our software and contribute to our projects -- or not. It's up to you. 

We ask that you leave commercial interests at the door.

Countless organizations are proving that their team members who collaborate in a vendor-neutral environment often apply Open Innovation processes (such as The Apache Way) to their work. This helps create internal efficiencies and lays the groundwork for new external opportunities that may provide additional added benefits.

Bringing only your intention of contributing what best serves the greater Apache community reinforces trust in the people and projects behind the Apache brand, and helps us realize our mission of providing software for the public good. 

We learn together and work together to deliver the best software we can. 

Apache software is available for all.

The freedom to choose is what makes the Foundation and Apache projects so strong.

Summary

The software industry has changed and continues to change. The ways software is delivered to end users have changed. Some of the leaders in our industry have retired and new leaders have emerged. But some things have not changed. Our model of collaborative software development, through a combination of a licensing and social framework, remains one of the most successful models of software production.

Increasing the number of users, even those who do not contribute to code, should be seen as a benefit, not a problem, in Open Source. More users present an opportunity. At Apache, more users means more success since they are our future contributors.

As a US 501(c)(3) public charitable organization, The Apache Software Foundation helps individuals and organizations understand how Open Source at scale works in a highly competitive market. For more than two decades our focus has not been on producing software, but rather mentoring communities who produce software. The Apache Way advances sustainable Open Source communities: everything we do is Open Source so all kinds of users can benefit from our experience. Apache is for everyone.

# # #

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.

# # #

Wakefield, MA —23 January 2019— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache® Hadoop® v3.2.0, the latest version of the Open Source software framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

Now in its 11th year, Apache Hadoop is the foundation of the US$166B Big Data ecosystem (source: IDC) by enabling data applications to run and be managed on large hardware clusters in a distributed computing environment. "Apache Hadoop has been at the center of this big data transformation, providing an ecosystem with tools for businesses to store and process data on a scale that was unheard of several years ago," according to Accenture Technology Labs.

"This latest release unlocks the powerful feature set the Apache Hadoop community has been working on for more than nine months," said Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli, Vice President of Apache Hadoop. "It further diversifies the platform by building on the cloud connector enhancements from Apache Hadoop 3.0.0 and opening it up for deep learning use-cases and long-running apps."

Apache Hadoop 3.2.0 highlights include:

• ABFS Filesystem connector —supports the latest Azure Datalake Gen2 Storage;
• Enhanced S3A connector —including better resilience to throttled AWS S3 and DynamoDB IO;
• Node Attributes Support in YARN —helps to tag multiple labels on the nodes based on its attributes and supports placing the containers based on expression of these labels;
• Storage Policy Satisfier  —supports HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) applications to move the blocks between storage types as they set the storage policies on files/directories; 
• Hadoop Submarine —enables data engineers to easily develop, train and deploy deep learning models (in TensorFlow) on very same Hadoop YARN cluster;
• C++ HDFS client —helps to do async IO to HDFS which helps downstream projects such as Apache ORC;
• Upgrades for long running services —supports in-place seamless upgrades of long running containers via YARN Native Service API (application program interface) and CLI (command-line interface).

"This is one of the biggest releases in Apache Hadoop 3.x line which brings many new features and over 1,000 changes," said Sunil Govindan, Apache Hadoop 3.2.0 release manager. "We are pleased to announce that Apache Hadoop 3.2.0 is available to take your data management requirements to the next level. Thanks to all our contributors who helped to make this release happen."

Apache Hadoop is widely deployed at numerous enterprises and institutions worldwide, such as Adobe, Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, Capital One, Cloudera, Cornell University, eBay, ESA Calvalus satellite mission, Facebook, foursquare, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, Hulu, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Rakuten, SAP, Tencent, Teradata, Tesla Motors, Twitter, Uber, and Yahoo. The project maintains a list of educational and production users, as well as companies that offer Hadoop-related services at https://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy

Global Knowledge hails, "...the open-source Apache Hadoop platform changes the economics and dynamics of large-scale data analytics due to its scalability, cost effectiveness, flexibility, and built-in fault tolerance. It makes possible the massive parallel computing that today's data analysis requires."

Hadoop is proven at scale: Netflix captures 500+B daily events using Apache Hadoop. Twitter uses Apache Hadoop to handle 5B+ sessions a day in real time. Twitter’s 10,000+ node cluster processes and analyzes more than a zettabyte of raw data through 200B+ tweets per year. Facebook’s cluster of 4,000+ machines that store 300+ petabytes is augmented by 4 new petabytes of data generated each day. Microsoft uses Apache Hadoop YARN to run the internal Cosmos data lake, which operates over hundreds of thousands of nodes and manages billions of containers per day.

Transparency Market Research recently reported that the global Hadoop market is anticipated to rise at a staggering 29% CAGR with a market valuation of US$37.7B by the end of 2023.

Apache Hadoop remains one of the most active projects at the ASF: it ranks #1 for Apache project repositories by code commits, and is the #5 repository by size (3,881,797 lines of code).

"The Apache Hadoop community continues to go from strength to strength in further driving innovation in Big Data," added Vavilapalli. "We hope that developers, operators and users leverage our latest release in fulfilling their data management needs."

Catch Apache Hadoop in action at the Strata conference, 25-28 March 2019 in San Francisco, and dozens of Hadoop MeetUps held around the world, including on 30 January 2019 at LinkedIn in Sunnyvale, California.

Apache Hadoop 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 Hadoop, visit http://hadoop.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/hadoop

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, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

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

# # #

Wakefield, MA —12 December 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® Griffin™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Griffin is a robust Open Source Big Data quality solution for distributed data systems at any scale. It provides a unified process to measure data quality from different perspectives, as well as building and validating trusted data assets in both streaming or batch contexts. Griffin originated at eBay and entered the Apache Incubator in December 2016.

"We are very proud of Griffin reaching this important milestone," said William Guo, Vice President of Apache Griffin. "By actively improving Big Data quality, Griffin helps build trusted data assets, therefore boosting your confidence in your business." 

Apache Griffin enables data scientists/analysts to handle data quality issues by:

• Defining –specifying data quality requirements such as accuracy, completeness, timeliness, profiling, etc.;
  
  
• Measuring –source data ingested into the Griffin computing cluster will apply data quality measurement based on user-defined requirements; and
  
  
• Applying Metrics –data quality reports as metrics will be exported to designated destination.
  
  

In addition, Griffin allows users to easily onboard new requirements into the platform and write comprehensive logic to further define their data quality. 

Apache Griffin is in use in high volume, high demand environments at 163.com/Netease, eBay, Expedia, Huawei, JD.com, Meituan, PayPal, Pingan Bank, PPDAI, VIP.com, and VMWare, among others.

"eBay contributed Griffin to the Apache Incubator in December 2016 to ensure its future development in a community-driven manner. It started with the idea on how eBay could address the data quality issue across multiple systems, especially in streaming context," said Vivian Tian, VP of eBay, GM - China Center of Excellence. "Griffin brings data quality solution to data ecosystem and ensure data applications have a solid quality foundation. We are extremely happy to see Griffin graduate as an Apache Top Level Project, and look forward to continued innovation and collaboration with the Apache community."

"We have been using Apache Griffin for about two years, monitoring 1000+ tables with data quality metrics, and are very happy to see it graduate to a Top-Level Project," said Chao Zhu, Senior Director at VIPshop Finance. "Apache Griffin and its data quality DSL can help us easily identify data quality issues instantly on our big data platform. In addition, Apache Griffin's architecture is highly extensible. We are looking forward to using it in real time data quality management system. We also look forward to contribute some of our minor enhancement to Griffin back to the community."

"Apache Griffin is one of the best data quality solutions which my team has been used so far. It has been an exciting journey seeing the Griffin community evolve rapidly. And many people iteratively adopting it and contributing to newer capabilities," said Austin Sun, Senior Engineering Manager, Enterprise Service Platform at PayPal. "In PayPal risk domain, we benefit a lot from Apache Griffin to provide high quality data to make precise decision and protect our customer. In addition to PayPal risk, I knew there are several other corporates also leverages core capability from Griffin as their data quality solution. It’s my great honor to witness Griffin grows to a top level project. Way to go, Griffin."

"Apache Griffin project is yet another showcase how community over code can work for projects coming out from internal usages of companies into the open source," said Henry Saputra, ASF member and Incubator Mentor for Apache Griffin. "I am proud to be the part of the projects and mentors for the project when it was being contributed from eBay, in addition to several other projects already donated to ASF such as Apache Kylin and Eagle. The team has worked tremendously hard to adapt the Apache Way, and also shown great respect for the open source community in all the processes for design, development, and release processes.As a Top-Level Project I believe the PMC will help lead the project to much more success in the future."

"Graduation is not the end, it is the beginning of another journey. We hope to take Apache Griffin to the next level with a wider set of features and users," added Guo. "We welcome anyone to join our efforts by helping with product design, documentation, code, technical discussions or promoting Apache Griffin in The Apache Way."

Apache Griffin 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 Griffin, visit http://griffin.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apachegriffin

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 730 individual Members and 6,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, 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, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

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

# # #

Wakefield, MA —25 September 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^® Pulsar™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Pulsar is a next-generation, Open Source distributed publish-and-subscribe messaging system designed for scalability, flexibility, and no data loss.

"We are very proud of Pulsar reaching this important milestone. This is the testament to all work done over the years by all the contributors, before and after starting our journey within The Apache Software Foundation," said Matteo Merli, Vice President of Apache Pulsar. "During the incubation process, it has been amazing to see the community grow and the project mature at such a high pace. The last year has seen the evolution of Pulsar from a its original messaging core into an integrated platform for data in motion. We are thrilled to continue drive the innovation in this exciting and fast moving space."

Pulsar is a highly scalable, low latency messaging platform running on commodity hardware. It provides simple pub-sub and queue semantics over topics, lightweight compute framework, automatic cursor management for subscribers, and cross-datacenter replication. The project was originally developed at Yahoo (now part of Oath), and was submitted to the Apache Incubator June 2017. 

The initial goal for Pulsar was to create a multi-tenant scalable messaging system that could serve as a unified platform for a wide set of very demanding use cases. Thanks to the original design we have been able to iterate and expand the scope of the project, adding lightweight compute and a connector frameworks that allow users to process data and integrate with external systems, all from within Pulsar. 

The unique architecture of Pulsar, which separates the serving and storage layers, leveraging Apache BookKeeper as the storage component, has proven to be a key strong point. The two layers architecture enables Pulsar to offer a vastly simplified approach to the cluster operations, allowing operators to easily expand clusters and replace failed nodes, or by providing a much higher write and read availability. 

Apache Pulsar is in use at MercadoLibre, Oath, One Click Retail, STICorp, TaxiStartup, Yahoo Japan Corporation, and Zhaopin.com, among others.

"Launching Pulsar at Yahoo in 2015, our goal has always been to make Pulsar widely used and well-integrated with other large-scale open source software," said Joe Francis, Director, Storage and Messaging, Oath. "We are excited for Pulsar's graduation and to see the growth of its vibrant open-source developer community within The Apache Software Foundation. At Oath we run Apache Pulsar at scale across many major products — including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and Oath Ad Platforms — and in multiple data centers across the globe, with full mesh replication. Pulsar will continue to be an integral part of our tech stack, in streaming and also as a bridge between public and private clouds in our hybrid cloud strategy."

"At Zhaopin.com, we have used Apache Pulsar to build our enterprise event bus, because it has many enterprise features to address the shortcomings of existing messaging systems, such as message durability, low latency," said Hui Li, Director of Infrastructure Group at Zhaopin. "We also contributed a few exciting features to Pulsar, and are planning to work with the community to contribute more. It's been thrilling to watch the community grow, and I'm very proud and excited to see that the project is graduating. Pulsar has a bright future, and I'm looking forward to what's to come."

"We have used Apache Pulsar as a centralized pub-sub messaging platform for many of our services/applications. It has remarkable features; multi-tenancy and horizontal scalability that allows us to deal with a large number of services/applications on a single system, and durability, high throughput and low latency bring reliable real-time pub-sub messaging to users," said Nozomi Kurihara, Manager of Messaging Platform team at Yahoo Japan Corporation. "We're very excited with the graduation of Pulsar, and strongly believe it will play a significant role in the next generation of stream processing. We will continue to contribute by sending more pull-requests and by holding community events etc. in our aspirations for continued growth."

"After two years of struggling with the complexity of other technologies, we turned to Apache Pulsar for a new platform that would simplify our data pipeline," said Jowanza Joseph, Principal Software Engineer at One Click Retail. "Because of Pulsar's unique combination of messaging and stream processing, we've been able to replace multiple systems with one solution that works seamlessly in our Kubernetes environment. Pulsar functions has allowed us to dramatically simplify our stream processing pipeline and to reduce the cost associated with production grade stream processing systems. Seeing Pulsar become a top-level Apache project is a great milestone that validates our confidence in the current and future innovations of Pulsar and the Pulsar community."

"With the graduation, we hope to take the Apache Pulsar project and community to the next level and to reach a wider set of users and contributors, with the ultimate goal of building a strong ecosystem," added Merli. "We welcome anyone to join our efforts by helping with code, documentation or technical discussions in our forums."

Catch Apache Pulsar in action at ApacheCon North America 24-27 September 2018.

Apache Pulsar 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 Pulsar, visit http://pulsar.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apache_pulsar .

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 730 individual Members and 6,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Pulsar", "Apache Pulsar", "BookKeeper", "Apache BookKeeper", 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.

# # #

Wakefield, MA —4 June 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^® Traffic Control™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache Traffic Control can be used to build, monitor, configure, and provision a large-scale content delivery network (CDN). Traffic Control originated at Comcast and was released as an Open Source project in April 2015; the project was donated to the Apache Incubator in July 2016.

"We are extremely excited to be an Apache Top-Level Project," said Dave Neuman, Vice President of Apache Traffic Control. "This is an amazing milestone for Traffic Control, and a testament to scale, strength and dedication of everyone in our community." 

Traffic Control is a CDN control plane originally built around Apache Traffic Server as the caching software. Traffic Control implements all the core functions of a modern CDN using the following components:

• Traffic Router — Routes clients to the best available cache on the CDN using HTTP(s) redirects or DNS;
• Traffic Monitor — Monitors caches for both system and application metrics and uses those to make health decisions on the CDN;
• Traffic Ops — Configuration, tenant, and inventory management for all CDN components;
• Traffic Stats — Calculates and stores statistics about CDNs managed by Traffic Control; and 
• Traffic Portal — User interface for managing and operating Traffic Control CDNs

Every day, Traffic Control CDNs serve over 50 billion transactions amounting to over 30 petabytes of content worldwide. Apache Traffic Control is in use at Comcast, Cisco, Cox, and Qwilt, among others.

"Traffic Control unlocks significant innovation in the CDN space," said Mark Torluemke, Director of CDN Engineering at Comcast. "The ASF is the perfect place for that innovation to thrive."

"Having Traffic Control become an Apache Top-Level Project is a testament to the technology's functional breadth, performance, and scalability in building Content Delivery Networks," said Eric Friedrich, OMD Technical Leader at Cisco. "As an active contributor to Traffic Control, Cisco is very excited to continue incorporating Traffic Control into its Open Media Distribution offering for Service Provider video distribution solutions."

"Qwilt is thrilled to see Traffic Control receive this hard-earned and well-deserved status as an Apache Top-Level Project. TLP status recognizes the extraordinary work and progress of the Traffic Control community of contributors," said Alon Maor, CEO at Qwilt. "We are proud to be part of this community and particularly pleased to see Traffic Control's stature continue to rise within the Apache Software Foundation. As we go to market with Traffic Control, we consistently get feedback from prospects and customers about the value of an Open Source approach to the modern CDN. The Apache Traffic Control Project embodies the Web-scale innovation that service providers are so eager to embrace."

"Cox has been involved with this project since 2014 and has over 4 years of experience with running it in a large national network. Apache Traffic Control is the first CDN platform in the Open Source domain and really brings something that was missing in the market," said Steve Malenfant, Principal Engineer at Cox. "We love the flexibility of the system and the ease to scale up as well as being able to collaborate with peers that have similar challenges."

"As great as this accomplishment is, it's only the beginning," added Neuman. "We are looking forward to growing our community, attracting new contributors, and continuing to be a leader in the CDN space."

The Traffic Control community holds summits twice a year and is very active on Slack as well as its official project user and developer mailing lists. Catch Apache Traffic Control in action at ApacheCon North America 24-27 September 2018.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Traffic Control 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 Traffic Control, visit http://trafficcontrol.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 730 individual Members and 6,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Traffic Control", "Apache Traffic Control", 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.

Wakefield, MA —23 May 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^® Wicket^TM v8.0.0, the component-oriented Web framework.

Apache Wicket is a popular component-oriented server-side Java Web framework used to build complex Web applications reaping the benefits of object oriented programming such as reusability, encapsulation and easy extensibility. With the tagline of "Write less, achieve more," the latest major release of Apache Wicket aims to help developers write even more robust, maintainable, and highly performant Web applications and Websites for governments, stores, universities, cities, banks, email providers, and more.

"Apache Wicket 8's flagship feature, support for Java 8 idioms, started off a few years ago, and allows for a really great development experience where you can achieve the same functionality in a more secure, readable way," said Martijn Dashorst, Vice President of Apache Wicket. "I think our users are going to be very happy with the benefits it brings."

Apache Wicket was initially developed in 2004 and joined The Apache Software Foundation in 2007. The project is one of the few survivors of the "Java server-side Web framework wars" of the mid 2000's —with a robust history and growing user base over the past decade, Apache Wicket remains a premier choice for Java developers across the world.

Using Apache Wicket, developers are able to build custom components easily, using normal Java idioms for extensibility and encapsulation. Wicket gives developers the ability to create complex user interfaces using just Java and HTML, and keep the applications secure and maintainable. Apache Wicket abstracts the request oriented Web technologies away and provides user interface concepts to the Java developer. So instead of thinking "requests" and "responses", developers using Wicket think "Pages", "Panels", "Buttons", "Links", "Forms" and "ListViews".

Apache Wicket 8.0.0 includes new features, bug fixes and improvements that include:

• Java 8 or newer is required
• Servlet 3.1 is required
• Component databinding (IModel) is now a Functional Interface
• Native JSR 310 Date/Time support
• Java's Optional type is used in the right places
• Removal of many deprecated features from previous versions

The full list of new features and changes is available in the project release notes at https://wicket.apache.org/2018/05/22/wicket-8-released.html

"Wicket 8 is a long awaited milestone for the project," said Andrea del Bene, Apache Wicket committer and Apache Wicket v8.0 Release Manager. "We are proud to provide all the new functionality to Web developers who can leverage Java 8 to remove many lines of code throughout their code bases. The new features are essential for modern Java developers. With Wicket 8, developers can create more maintainable and better performant applications."

Apache Wicket is used by thousands of organizations that include Åland Islands Library, Brazilian Air Force, Emirates Real Estate Investment Trust, German National Library of Science and Technology, India Goa Directorate of Agriculture, Japan National Police Agency, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Orange Moldova, Pune Smart City, RiskCo, Savings Banks Group Finland, Sweden's Helge Library, Taiwan High Speed Rail, and Topicus B.V., among others.

"Apache Wicket always had security as one of its pillar stones. This is why we know our access management solution Topicus KeyHub has a solid foundation with Wicket," said Martijn Maatman, manager at Topicus B.V. "Wicket 8 contains new and improved features to increase security and effectiveness. This makes it our framework of choice to build software solutions that can stand the test of time."

"Apache Wicket's focus on plain Java and HTML enabled OpenMeetings to migrate from Flash to a maintainable codebase," said Maxim Solodovnik, VP of Apache OpenMeetings™ Web conferencing project. "The stability and modularity of the Wicket framework gives us the assurance our investment is not obsolete in a couple of weeks or months."

"Wicket comes with a great user guide, and with our quick-start wizard you can have your first Wicket project up and running in seconds," added Dashorst.

Catch Apache Wicket in action with live examples on the Apache Wicket Website, as well as many available recordings of presentations from JavaZone, Devoxx, and ApacheCon.

Apache Wicket 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 Wicket, visit http://wicket.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/apache_wicket 

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 6,800 Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

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

# # #

World's largest Open Source foundation's all-volunteer community makes a difference in the lives of billions of users. 

[click for "Apache at 19" promo]. 

Wakefield, MA —26 March 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 19th Anniversary, and its meritocratic, community-driven process known as "The Apache Way" as the key to its success.

The world's largest Open Source foundation is home to dozens of freely-available (no cost), enterprise-grade Apache projects that serve as the backbone for some of the most visible and widely used applications in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Big Data, Build Management, Cloud Computing, Content Management, DevOps, IoT and Edge Computing, Mobile, Servers, and Web Frameworks, among many other categories. Examples of the breadth of applications that are "Powered by Apache" include:

• 80M+ Websites that use the Apache HTTP Server;
• the 2.6-terabyte, Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers investigation;
• system-wide information management at the US Federal Aviation Administration; 
• 500+B daily event capture each day at Netflix;
• mobile application development unification across Android/Blackberry/iOS/Ubuntu/Windows/Windows Phone/OS X platforms; 
• request processing at Facebook’s 300-petabyte data warehouse;
• powering clouds for Apple, Disney, Huawei, Tata, and countless others; and 
• accessing content across multi-mission, multi-instrument science data systems at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
  
  

"As we celebrate 19 years of Open Source collaboration, we have a lot to be thankful for at the ASF," said ASF Chairman Phil Steitz. "First, the many volunteers who contribute to our projects.  Some have been contributing continuously since inception and many more join us every year. We now have 6,618 committers, with 504 added just in the last year. Second, we are fortunate to have the constant inflow of new people and communities keeping  the ASF on the cutting edge of new technologies. Finally, we receive generous support from 48 corporate sponsors and thousands of individual donors. As we approach the end of our 'teenage' years, the ASF stands as a vibrant, healthy, leading organization committed to our mission of providing software for the public good by supporting collaborative, open development communities."

Highlights of the Apache community's successes over the past 12 months include:

• continued guardianship of 190M+ lines of code in the Apache repositories;
• 9M+ source code downloads from Apache mirrors (excl. convenience binaries);
• 3,255 Committers changed 71,186,324 lines of code over 225,500 commits;
• 194 Top-Level Project committees managing 319 projects;
• 20 new Top-Level Projects graduated from the Apache Incubator;
• 54 podlings currently undergoing development in the Apache Incubator;
• 21,893 authors sent 1,771,557 emails on 662,661 topics across 1,131 mailing lists;
• Web requests received from every Internet-connected country on the planet; and
• 35M page views per week across apache.org.
  
  

"The Apache Software Foundation’s extraordinary contribution to the economic refactoring of software stacks seems to be gaining more momentum with every passing year," wrote Merv Adrian, Analyst and Research Vice President at Gartner. "...the role of the ASF remains so important: by providing a vehicle for developers to work 'in the open,' while keeping the playing field level in many respects, the ASF has enabled the rapid development and pervasive spread of key layers that everyone benefits from." https://blogs.gartner.com/merv-adrian/?p=1213

At the heart of the ASF is its people: Apache software development and project leadership is executed entirely by volunteers. The ASF Board and officers are all volunteers. The dedication of 706 individual ASF Members and thousands of committed volunteers helps make a difference to the lives of billions by ensuring that Apache software remains accessible to all, and always 100% free of charge. Their allegiance is testament to the slogan of "Community Over Code" often paired with The Apache Way that ensures the ASF delivers on its mission of providing Open Source software for the public good.

As a United States private, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization, the ASF relies on charitable donations to advance the future of open development, and is sustained by through tax-deductible contributions from generous corporations, foundations, and individuals. Their contributions help offset day-to-day operating expenses that include bandwidth, connectivity, servers, hardware, legal counsel, accounting services, trademark protection, public relations, marketing, and related support staff. As a very lean operation, the ASF spends 10% or less on overhead.

ASF Sponsors include: PLATINUM –Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, Pineapple Fund; GOLD –ARM, Bloomberg, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, ODPi, Pivotal; SILVER –Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Inspur, iSIGMA, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Serenata Flowers, Target, Union Investment, and Wandisco; BRONZE –7 Binary Options, Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Casino2k, Compare Forex Brokers, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, SCAMS.info, Spotify, Talend, Travel Ticker Hotels, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, Wise Buyer.

In addition, the ASF recently announced its new Targeted Sponsors, who provide the Foundation with contributions for specific activities or programs, such as donating cloud services, funding a project hackathon, providing legal services, offering a member benefit, underwriting expenses for ApacheCon, or something entirely new. It’s the Apache way of recognizing the sponsors that we rely on every day outside of and often in addition to funding our general operations. ASF Targeted Sponsors include: PLATINUM –Microsoft, Oath, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype; GOLD –Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP; SILVER –Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, Quenda, Rackspace; BRONZE –Assembla, Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru.