Incubator PMC report for April 2025

The Apache Incubator is the entry path into the ASF for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts.

There are currently 34 podlings incubating. In March, podlings executed four distinct releases, and one IP clearance occurred. Several incubating proposals have been discussed on the mailing list (PouchDB, Hamilton and Burr), and we have one new podling called Texera. Five people were added to the IPMC, primarily as mentors for the new incubating projects under discussion.

No podlings have retired, but a couple are talking about it. A few podlings failed to report and will be asked to report next month.

Conversations on the list have been chiefly about releases and new incubating projects. There was a continuation of the discussion about performing name searches early at the start of the incubator process to ensure that polling names are not rejected close to graduation, and our policy has changed to reflect that. This originally came up as a podling needed to change its name close to graduation.

Several projects have been incubating for a long time, and each was contracted to see what they could do. So far, I've had no response from Toree, Annotator, or Livy (but they did report this month). Toree seems to be making slow progress towards graduation. Nemo and Annotator are considering retirement. Discussions are taking place with NLPCraft, but it will possibly retire. Moving forward towards graduation are Pegasus, Training, Teaclave and Wayang.

There was a discussion on what to do with Pony Mail, but no consensus has been reached.  ## Community

New IPMC members:

• Jingsong Lee
• Mingyang Liu
• Cezar Andrei
• Jan Lehnardt
• Guo Jiwei

People who left the IPMC:

• None

New Podlings

• Texera

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

• Amoro
• Annotator
• HugeGraph
• Otava
• PonyMail
• ResilientDB

Graduations

• None

The board has motions for the following:

• None

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of March:

• Gluten 1.3.0
• OzHera 2.2.5
• Seata 2.3.0
• StormCrawler 3.3.0

IP Clearance

• Spark-Cassandra-Connector

Legal / Trademarks

Change in policy to name searches to occur early where possible.

Table of Contents

Gluten
HertzBeat
Iggy
Livy
Pegasus
StormCrawler
Teaclave

Gluten

Gluten is a middle layer responsible for offloading JVM-based SQL engines' execution to native engines.

Gluten has been incubating since 2024-01-11.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Apache Release: Plan to quarterly publish Apache Officail Release
2. Enhance Document and Website to meet Apache standards
3. Community Growth

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

N/A

How has the community developed since the last report?

• The number of fork is from 376 to 474.
• The number of star is from 1064 to 1310.
• The number of contributors is from 134 to 163.
• Add 4 new committers, currently with total 38 committers Regular monthly meeting with notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g-veyoNB1QYFJY4-TMdewAq8wMkQqltbEt46CPxBrfE/edit?usp=sharing

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Gluten 1.2.0 has been released as 1st Apache release on Sep. 3 2024.
• Gluten 1.2.1 has been released as 2nd Apache release(minor update) on Dec. 12 2024.
• Gluten 1.3.0 has been released as 3rd Apache release(major update) on Jan. 24 2025.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2025-01-24

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-03-07 for vote result published

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, they remain attentive to this project and offer valuable suggestions.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes, everything is fine.

Signed-off-by:

•  (gluten) Yu Li
  Comments: Good to see a steady pace of release planning and producing, as well as new committers joining. I believe the community is developing in a healthy way.
•  (gluten) Wenli Zhang
  Comments:
•  (gluten) Kent Yao
  Comments:
•  (gluten) Shaofeng Shi
  Comments: LGTM, keep building the community.
•  (gluten) Felix Cheung
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

HertzBeat

HertzBeat is an easy-to-use, open source, real-time monitoring system. It features an agentless architecture, high-performance clustering, Prometheus compatibility, and powerful custom monitoring and status page building capabilities.

HertzBeat has been incubating since 2024-04-05.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the community and attract more users.
2. Publish more Apache release by different committers.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No.

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. 25 contributors submit 130 commits.
2. Now the community total has 259 contributors, attracted 8 new contributors since last report.
3. A new committer and a new PPMC join the community since last report.
4. The community participated in the Google Summer of Code and OSPP.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. The new version 1.7.0 is in the process of release.
2. New alarm design has been developed and implemented.
3. More features and bugfix, doc update
4. In the past month, excluding merges, 22 authors have pushed 43 commits to master and 84 commits to all branches. On master, 222 files have changed and there have been 7,052 additions and 1,199 deletions.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

 2024-11-22, new release is being voted on

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-03-26

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, they are very nice.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

 There are no known brand and naming issues.

Signed-off-by:

•  (hertzbeat) Yonglun Zhang
  Comments:
•  (hertzbeat) Yu Xiao
  Comments:
•  (hertzbeat) Justn Mclean
  Comments:
•  (hertzbeat) Francis Chuang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Iggy

Iggy is a high-performance, ultra-low latency and large-scale persistent message streaming platform written in Rust.

Iggy has been incubating since 2025-02-04.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Continue expanding the community  
2. Add client sdk repos under the main repo, setup CI/CD pipelines for release client sdks independently
3. Improve and extend documentation about various optimizations, configs to help onboard more users, developers easily

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

• Announced the Apache Incubator acceptance via blogs
• Presented at a couple of Rust conferences
• New members have joined the discord channel
• Started leveraging Github Discussions on a the next set of core features: zero copy deserializaton, connectors, object storage etc
• Since the incubation proposal: Number of downloads increased to ~115k from 90k, Github stars increased to 2.4k from 2.2k

How has the project developed since the last report?

• This is the first report
• Migrated the external git repo to apache github account
• Finished various onboarding tasks with the help from mentors, INFRA team
• Created iggy-website git repo, launched the website iggy.apache.org
• Updated the source code to use Apache License headers
• Resolved various issues related the CI/CD pipelines, PR merge hooks etc
• A major rewrite is underway for zero-copy deserialization, significantly increasing the performance and efficiencies, changes are tracked under the branch "zero-copy-no-batching"

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

We're still working on the first apache release.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

February 2025, at the time of onboarding to Apache Incubator Program.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, the mentors are very helpful.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes

Signed-off-by:

•  (iggy) Hao Ding
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Yonik Seeley
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Zili Chen
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Hulk Lin
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Livy

Livy is web service that exposes a REST interface for managing long running Apache Spark contexts in your cluster. With Livy, new applications can be built on top of Apache Spark that require fine grained interaction with many Spark contexts.

Livy has been incubating since 2017-06-05.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Revitalization of the Community
2. Dependable Release Cadence
3. Keep the project up to date with security fixes and in terms of Spark support

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

We have received a number of PRs and merged mostly bug fixes and smaller enhancements. Kubernetes support has also been added which is a major new feature.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Kubernetes support has been added as a major deliverable for the next release. Another feature we are working on to add in the upcoming release is support for the latest Spark 3.5.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

 2023-10-10

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

October 2023

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No answer

Signed-off-by:

•  (livy) Bikas Saha
  Comments:
•  (livy) Luciano Resende
  Comments:
•  (livy) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments: I think it would be great to have a kind of roadmap about releases (0.8.0-incubating is two years old) and community growth (blog post, ...).
•  (livy) Madhawa Kasun Gunasekara
  Comments:
•  (livy) Larry McCay
  Comments:
•  (livy) György Gál
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Pegasus

Pegasus is a distributed key-value storage system which is designed to be simple, horizontally scalable, strongly consistent and high-performance.

Pegasus has been incubating since 2020-06-28.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Supplement and revise the documentation on the official website (https://pegasus.apache.org/), and complete the English versions of the documents.
2. Make more releases in ASF policy regularly.
3. Improve the Pegasus project performance, stability, and usage scenarios.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

We saw more active users and contributors of Apache Pegasus.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The release of 2.6.0, originally scheduled for the end of 2024, has been postponed due to the incomplete implementation of some features. The new release date is yet to be determined.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-12-12

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

None

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, our mentors gave us a lot of help, including version release, holding meetup, prepare the graduation and etc.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes.

Signed-off-by:

•  (pegasus) Duo zhang
  Comments:
•  (pegasus) Liang Chen
  Comments:
•  (pegasus) Von Gosling
  Comments:
•  (pegasus) Liu Xun
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

StormCrawler

StormCrawler is a collection of resources for building low-latency, customisable and scalable web crawlers on Apache Storm.

StormCrawler has been incubating since 2024-03-19.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

There are no remaining issues. After list discussions with our mentors, we have confirmed that it would be the right time for graduation.0

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None.

How has the community developed since the last report?

StormCrawler remains well-established, with a steady user base over the past decade. While the number of committers and contributors remains small, the project's activity level is comparable to some established TLPs.

Seasoned committers with experience across various ASF projects continue to contribute, ensuring the project's stability and sustainability.

Although community growth has been minimal (but did happen), there has been some progress.

Additionally, the rise of generative AI has shifted focus toward production-ready, turnkey solutions, reducing the incentive for many users to contribute directly to StormCrawler. Instead, they often prefer to adopt mature, off-the-shelf software like StormCrawler rather than actively participating in development.

This industry trend may explain the limited influx of new contributors despite the project's ongoing relevance.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project has seen steady progress with various bug fixes and dependency updates. Additionally, there have been some external contributions to the documentation, indicating ongoing interest and engagement from the community.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

The project is well-established, has maintained steady activity, and has experienced contributors who are familiar with ASF processes. While community growth has been modest, the project's engagement level and stability suggest it is ready for graduation.

The presence of seasoned committers and ongoing development efforts further support this assessment.

Date of last release:    

2025-03-24

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2024-09-21

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, our mentors have been supportive, providing guidance throughout the process. They have been available for discussions, particularly regarding the project's readiness for graduation, and have helped ensure we are on the right track.

Their experience and insights have been valuable in navigating ASF Incubator processes.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes. The name was approved by VP Trademarks.

Signed-off-by:

•  (stormcrawler) Dave Fisher
  Comments:
•  (stormcrawler) Lewis John McGibbney
  Comments:
•  (stormcrawler) Ayush Saxena
  Comments: Successfully managed multiple releases during incubation and now preparing for graduation.  
•  (stormcrawler) PJ Fanning
  Comments: Discussing Graduation

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Teaclave  

Teaclave is a universal secure computing platform, enabling writing memory-safe trusted applications in Rust running inside Trusted Execution Environment.

Teaclave has been incubating since 2019-08-20. The Teaclave community is now working towards graduation.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Practice future releases by adhering to the newly proposed quarterly
   release schedule.
2. Finalize discussions with the community to assess the project's overall
   maturity and readiness for graduation.
3. Conduct a thorough self-assessment to ensure all Apache graduation
   criteria are met.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

As the Teaclave community is working toward graduation, we appreciate any guidance on the process. Please let us know if there are any additional steps we should take beyond our current plan. Thank you.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• A new committer was elected.
• Three new participants joined, and seven new projects were forked on
  GitHub.
• Initiated collaboration with the OP-TEE community.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Made a release of the Teaclave TrustZone SDK with significant features.
• Established a quarterly release plan aligned with the OP-TEE community.
• Added Web3 use cases for building trusted applications using the
  Teaclave TrustZone SDK.  

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:  

We are in the process of releasing Apache Teaclave TrustZone SDK
(incubating) v0.4.0 and are currently seeking binding votes from PMC
members on the following thread: https://lists.apache.org/thread/8mstnqpoo0hy1sy8f96dyrkyrmcdwz2z

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-01-21  

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

We appreciate our mentors' support. However, we need help from PMC members
to vote on our release, as delays in securing votes slow down the release
process.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes.

Signed-off-by:

•  (teaclave) Felix Cheung
  Comments:
•  (teaclave) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:
•  (teaclave) Jianyong Dai
  Comments:
•  (teaclave) Matt Sicker
  Comments:
•  (teaclave) Zhijie Shen
  Comments:
•  (teaclave) Gordon King
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes: