The Apache Software Foundation Reaches Some Remarkable Milestones

The Apache Software Foundation is out with some news and metrics on its size and reach, and it's clear that the organization has advanced open source in enormous ways. In fact, this site runs on Apache tools.

While not everyone realizes it, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an  all-volunteer effort, and it incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, including Cordova, Flex, Lucene/Solr, Maven, OpenOffice, Tomcat, and the flagship Apache HTTP Server. Here are more details.

"We continue to see strong adoption of Apache software across diverse sectors and categories," said ASF President Ross Gardler. "Whether users are seeking Open Source solutions or not, Apache ranks as a top choice. Our brand strength, proven leadership, and community-driven process enable individuals and market competitors alike to collaborate in a trusted environment. This, in turn, furthers our mission of developing top quality software that is bolstered by vibrant, active communities."

Apache projects and categories that are experiencing widespread recognition include Ambari, Kafka, Mesos, and Spark --all winners of InfoWorld’s 2016 Technology of the Year award, and all recently covered on OStatic. In 2015, Apache products were featured more than 400 times in Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

According to Apache's announcement:

"Beginning with an inaugural membership of 21 individuals who oversaw the progress of the Apache HTTP Server, the ASF has grown to 588 individual members and 5,317 Committers collaborating across six continents. All development is done on a volunteer basis --some committers may be paid by their employers for their time and code contributions, but the ASF does not pay for software or project oversight."

There are 47 projects currently undergoing development in the Apache Incubator, 60% of which are in the Big Data category. I took note of Apache's increased focus on the Big Data space in this post. As noted there, here are some of the most notable Big Data projects that Apache is advancing:

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 these projects and more to move forward under Apache's supervision in 2016.