Apache Software Foundation Makes Lens, a Big Data Tool, a Top Level Project

Whenever the Apache Software Foundation graduates an open source project to become a Top Level Project, it tends to bode well for the project. Just look at what's happened with Apache Spark, for example. 

Now, the  Foundation (ASF), which is the steward for and incubates more than 350 Open Source projects, has 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."

"I am really thrilled to see Lens graduating so soon after getting incubated in ASF," said Mohit Saxena, Founder and CTO of InMobi. "Lens is really a perfect example how technology can be leveraged to remove complexity of traditional analytical platforms and provide a simple abstraction for end user. Earlier our reporting and data retrieval system were married to a compute and even storage engine and user had to juggle for results, Hence the need of something like Lens arises and I am so proud that lens has solved a big problem where user can simply use one query layer at the top while lens does all heavy lifting below it and I simply hope this is just the beginning and it will only thrive with the help of vibrant Apache community. God speed."

As a Top Level Project, Lens will draw attention from more developers and from the Apache Software Foundation. It is very common for such Apache projects to pick up large corporate sponsors, too. For example, IBM has committed $1 billion to investment around Spark, which began as an Apache project. OStatic will follow up on adoption and development surrounding Lens.