Apache Kudu is the Latest Open Source Big Data Project to Reach Top-Level Status

For the past year, we've taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and  has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support and more.

Continuing the trend, the foundation has announced that Apache Kudu has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Kudu is an open source columnar storage engine built for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem designed to enable flexible, high-performance analytic pipelines.

“Under the Apache Incubator, the Kudu community has grown to more than 45 developers and hundreds of users,” said Todd Lipcon, Vice President of Apache Kudu and Software Engineer at Cloudera. “We are excited to be recognized for our strong Open Source community and are looking forward to our upcoming 1.0 release.”

According to Apache:

"Optimized for lightning-fast scans, Kudu is particularly well suited to hosting time-series data and various types of operational data. In addition to its impressive scan speed, Kudu supports many operations available in traditional databases, including real-time insert, update, and delete operations. Kudu enables a “bring your own SQL” philosophy, and supports being accessed by multiple different query engines including such other Apache projects as Drill, Spark, and Impala (incubating)."

 Apache Kudu is in use at diverse companies and organizations across many industries, including retail, online service delivery, risk management, and digital advertising. It, like some of the other open source Big Data projects from Apache, has been tested and hardened in the real world. 

Also recently, Apache announced that its Bahir project has become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Spark developers will want to listen up. Bahir bolsters Big Data processing by serving as a home for existing connectors that initiated under Apache Spark, and provides additional extensions/plugins for other related distributed system, storage, and query execution systems.

Meanwhile, Apache Apex recently also graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project. Apex is a large scale, high throughput, low latency, fault tolerant, unified Big Data stream and batch processing platform for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

Here is more on other Apache Big Data projects that are moving forward:

Allura. According to the Allura project page, new features include an Admin Nav Bar, which is a an improvement on how users customize the tools of a project. There is also a new interface. Apache encourages users to read an admin toolbar post to see how easy it is to access tool configurations and add new tools with Allura.

Brooklyn. The foundation announced that Apache Brooklyn is now 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."  Brooklyn is an application blueprint and management platform used for integrating services across multiple data centers as well as and a wide range of software in the cloud.

According to the Brooklyn announcement:

"With modern applications being composed of many components, and increasing interest in micro-services architecture, the deployment and ongoing evolution of deployed apps is an increasingly difficult problem. Apache Brooklyn’s blueprints provide a clear, concise way to model an application, its components and their configuration, and the relationships between components, before deploying to public Cloud or private infrastructure. Policy-based management, built on the foundation of autonomic computing theory, continually evaluates the running application and makes modifications to it to keep it healthy and optimize for metrics such as cost and responsiveness."

Brooklyn is in use at some notable organizations. Cloud service providers Canopy and Virtustream have created product offerings built on Brooklyn. IBM has also made extensive use of Apache Brooklyn in order to migrate large workloads from AWS to IBM Softlayer.

Kylin. Meanwhile, the foundation has also just announced that Apache Kylin, an open source big data project born at eBay, has graduated to Top-Level status. Kylin is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide an SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, supporting extremely large datasets. It is widely used at eBay and at a few other organizations.

"Apache Kylin's incubation journey has demonstrated the value of Open Source governance at ASF and the power of building an open-source community and ecosystem around the project," said Luke Han, Vice President of Apache Kylin. "Our community is engaging the world's biggest local developer community in alignment with the Apache Way."

As an OLAP-on-Hadoop solution, Apache Kylin aims to fill the gap between Big Data exploration and human use, "enabling interactive analysis on massive datasets with sub-second latency for analysts, end users, developers, and data enthusiasts," according to developers. "Apache Kylin brings back business intelligence (BI) to Apache Hadoop to unleash the value of Big Data," they added.

Lens. Apache recently announced that Apache Lens, an open source Big Data and analytics tool, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

According to the announcement:

"Apache Lens is a Unified Analytics platform. It provides an optimal execution environment for analytical queries in the unified view. Apache Lens aims to cut the Data Analytics silos by providing a single view of data across multiple tiered data stores."

"By providing an online analytical processing (OLAP) model on top of data, Lens seamlessly integrates Apache Hadoop with traditional data warehouses to appear as one. It also provides query history and statistics for queries running in the system along with query life cycle management."

 "Incubating Apache Lens has been an amazing experience at the ASF," said Amareshwari Sriramadasu, Vice President of Apache Lens. "Apache Lens solves a very critical problem in Big Data analytics space with respect to end users. It enables business users, analysts, data scientists, developers and other users to do complex analysis with ease, without knowing the underlying data layout."

Ignite. The ASF has announced that Apache Ignite is to become a top-level project. It's an open source effort to build an in-memory data fabric that was driven by GridGain Systems and WANdisco.

Apache Ignite is a high-performance, integrated and distributed In-Memory Data Fabric for computing and transacting on large-scale data sets in real-time, "orders of magnitude faster than possible with traditional disk-based or flash technologies," according to Apache. It is designed to easily power both existing and new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware.

Tajo. Apache Tajo v0.11.0, an advanced open source data warehousing system in Apache Hadoop, is another new Top-Level project. Apache claims that Tajo provides the ability to rapidly extract more intelligence fro  Hadoop deployments, third party databases, and commercial business  intelligence tools.

And of course, Spark and other previously announced Big Data tools overseen by Apache are flourishing. Look for many more data- and developer-focused tools to move forward at Apache in the months to come.