Incubator PMC report for March 2026

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

As of February, there are 28 podlings under incubation. Five releases were made during the month, and no IP clearances were completed. Two podlings graduated, Gluten and Polaris, and no podlings retired. However, there are votes underway to retire BareMaps and HoraeDB. There were no additions or removals to IPMC membership.

Mailing list traffic during the month focused on release voting, graduation discussions and votes on retirement.

Auron was invited to take part in a 6-month review. Iggy also requested to participate in a review.

Most podlings continue to make steady progress toward graduation. Caldera is off to a slow start. Livy has voted to graduate on its mailing list, and Toree's latest release seems to be taking longer than expected. ResilientDB is likely to graduate soon.

Pegasus is still experiencing some community difficulties and may need follow-up.

There is some concern about the progress of OpenServerless, as they state they are nearing graduation, but have not made a release.

Two podlings, Caldera and OzHera, failed to submit a report and will be asked to report next month. All submitted podling reports had mentors' sign-off.

Community

New IPMC members:

• none

People who left the IPMC:

• none

New Podlings

• Casbin

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

• Caldera
• OzHera

Graduations

• Gluten
• Polaris

  The board has motions for the following:

• None

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of February:

• Fesod 2.0.1
• Gluten 1.6.0
• Iggy 0.7.0
• Livy 0.9.0
• Seata 2.6.0

IP Clearance

• None

Legal / Trademarks

• N/A

Infrastructure

• N/A

Table of Contents

Auron
Baremaps
BifroMQ
Caldera
Iggy
KIE
OpenServerless
Otava
OzHera
Polaris
PouchDB
GeaFlow

Auron

Auron accelerates Apache Spark SQL by providing an alternative vectorized execution layer implemented in Rust, enabling native performance while maintaining full Spark compatibility.

Auron has been incubating since 2025-08-05.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Increase public communication on dev@ and ensure all project decisions and planning are captured on the mailing list.
2. Grow the community and attract more contributors and users.
3. Enhance community diversity and sustainability.

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. One new committer added: Mang Zhang.
2. 10 new contributors since last release.
3. Continued active development with code quality improvements.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. Published 7.0.0-incubating release with 251 new commits.
2. Added three Improvement Proposals for Flink support, correctness testing, and CI integration testing.
3. Introduced new AuronConfiguration system and fixed major correctness issues.
4. Enhanced native function support with 20+ new functions.
5. Added Spark 4.0.2/3.5.8 and JDK 21 compatibility.
6. Improved CI/CD with JUnit 5 and code quality plugins.

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:

2026-03-04

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-12-19

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, all the mentors are helpful and responsive on the community growth and project development.

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

Yes. The podling name "Auron" has been reviewed by the VP, Brand. We are not aware of any misuse by third parties.

Signed-off-by:

•  (auron) Becket Qin
  Comments: Happy to see the development of Flink support.
•  (auron) Calvin Kirs
  Comments: Good to see the new version released.
•  (auron) Hao Ding
  Comments:
•  (auron) Nicholas Jiang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Baremaps

Apache Baremaps is a toolkit and a set of infrastructure components for creating, publishing, and operating online maps.

Baremaps has been incubating since 2022-10-10.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Baremaps has voted to retire from the Incubator, the corresponding Incubator PMC vote is ongoing.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been involved in the retirement decision.

Signed-off-by:

•  (baremaps) Bertrand Delacrétaz
  Comments:
•  (baremaps) Martin Desruisseaux
  Comments:
•  (baremaps) Julian Hyde
  Comments:
•  (baremaps) Calvin Kirs
  Comments: Voting on retirement.
•  (baremaps) George Percivall
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

BifroMQ

BifroMQ is a Java-based, high-performance, distributed MQTT broker with native multi-tenancy support, designed for large-scale connections and message delivery.

BifroMQ has been incubating since 2025-04-22.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Increase public exposure to expand the community user base and improve project visibility.
2. Continue delivering regular releases, streamline the release management process, and rotate the Release Manager role among key contributors.
3. Grow community participation beyond the original contributors, including attracting new reviewers and contributors.

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

We understand that the trademark transfer has been completed based on publicly available trademark ownership information (e.g. via https://aiqicha.baidu.com/mark/s?q=BIFROMQ&t=7). However, we would appreciate receiving an official confirmation from ASF (a scanned copy of the signed transfer agreement would be sufficient) so that our company can properly archive the transfer documentation for internal compliance purposes.

How has the community developed since the last report?

We have observed increasing activity on GitHub and the dev@ mailing list. Our mentor (Chris) helped initiate a valuable discussion with the Apache IoTDB community, which may lead to potential collaboration between the two projects. We have set up a WeChat Account (“BifroMQ”) to publish Chinese translations of release announcements. All published content is derived from or links back to the official Apache BifroMQ website, and the account is not used for community discussions.

How has the project developed since the last report?

We completed our first incubating release after 3 RC votes.

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:

2026-01-28

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

None so far

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Our mentors have been helpful and responsive.

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

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

We attempted to rename our WeChat account by adding the “Apache” prefix, based on PPMC consensus reached on the private mailing list. However, the request was rejected by the WeChat platform due to tightened naming policies, which now require an official authorization document from ASF to use “Apache” as an account prefix. We would appreciate guidance on whether there is a formal ASF process to request such an authorization letter for external platform compliance purposes.

Signed-off-by:

•  (bifromq) Christofer Dutz
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Xiangdong Huang
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Calvin Kirs
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Penghui Li
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Sheng Wu
  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, release more versions under ASF
2. Increase the use of GitHub Discussions/Issues integrated with mailing lists

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?

• Discord members count ~650, new contributors writing proposals (discussions), submitting PRs for fixing issues, docs, enhancements.
• Github stars reached 3.9K+
• Crates downloads reached 185K+
• Recent blog post on Apache Iggy's migration journey to thread-per-core architecture powered by io_uring (https://iggy.apache.org/blogs/2026/02/27/thread-per-core-io_uring) drew a lot of attention on other sites and social media and attracted critical talent
• Attending RustINDIA Conference 2026
• The community continues to grow. We are pleased to welcome Łukasz Zborek as a new Apache Iggy committer. Łukasz has been a core contributor to the C# SDK and is currently the #8 contributor in the repository. Beyond building a high-quality C# SDK, he has contributed across the project including CI improvements, BDD testing, TLS support, reconnection handling, and high-level consumer/publisher APIs.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Released 2 versions 0.6.0 and 0.7.0.
• 0.7.0 release had 188 commits from 19 contributors and over 1,200 files changed
• Deterministic tick-based timeout mechanism for VSR — improves reliability for Viewstamped Replication workflows, a core building block toward clustering and distributed coordination.
• New cluster primitives (on_replicate, send_prepare_ok, replicate, view change, partitions trait) to solidify cluster control paths and prepare for future distributed expansions.
• Metadata state machine foundation & snapshot interface — essential groundwork for robust metadata handling and future high-availability features.
• Embedded Web UI now included in the server and enabled by default — no extra deployment step required for the dashboard experience.
• NUMA awareness — improves performance on multi-socket hardware by aligning memory and CPU locality.
• Http.web_ui config option gives users control over Web UI exposure and configuration.
• Graceful shard shutdown on panic, enhanced async disk I/O availability handling, and improved critical task failure handling — all contribute to greater server resilience.
• Retry mechanism and detailed logging for connector HTTP configuration — increasing robustness when integrating with external systems.
• Prometheus metrics and stats endpoints now exposed for connectors so observability is first-class.
• Extended Postgres sink & source plugins with integration tests for richer pipeline ingestion.
• Connector runtime --version flag & other quality-of-life improvements for ops tooling.
• Java SDK enhancements: fluent builder API, better tests, and async serialization improvements.
• Python SDK: async iterator support for consumer — smoother integration for modern async apps.
• Go leader redirection scenario addition — improved client routing logic.
• C# SDK: expanded API surface and .NET 10 support.
• Linux edge binary builds + ARM64 support — expands platform compatibility for pre-release runners.
• Automated artifacts & enhanced CI workflows (auto-publish, better shared caches, native runners) to speed iteration and ensure release quality.
• Pre-commit hooks, TOML formatting, auto-publish workflows across SDKs and languages — boosts contribution hygiene.
• Expanded API tests, integration tests, watchdogs, and crash detection — better confidence in deployment and regression risk reduction.
• Rust toolchain bump (1.92.0) and widespread dependency updates.
• Replace unmaintained serialization (msgpack replacing old libs) — steers toward more sustainable and performant internals.
• Migration to up-to-date ecosystem dependencies (e.g., Yew & yew-router) for UI stack improvements.
• Many other improvements, ecosystem expansion tickets are in progress.

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: Expanding Ecosystem

Date of last release:

2026-02-25

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2026-01-13 [Łukasz Zborek is the last committer elected]

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, mentors are available for voting and approvals. That said, having a few more active mentors would be beneficial to ensure continuity and help us address any gaps as we move toward graduation.

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

There are no known brand and naming issues as reported here. VP, Brand approved the project name.

Signed-off-by:

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

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

KIE

KIE (Knowledge is Everything) is a community of solutions and supporting tooling for knowledge engineering and process automation, focusing on events, rules, and workflows.

KIE has been incubating since 2023-01-13.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Finish the remaining Category X removal
2. Community Building 
3. More releases

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

Nope.

How has the community developed since the last report?

New contributor submitting PRs with new functionalities.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Large chunks of Category X codebase has been removed. Hibernate has been upgraded to latest ASLv2 release, removing another major graduation blocker. Right now new release has been branched and Release Manager working on it.

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: With the large cleanup of Category X issues, we believe the next couple of releases will unlock graduation.

Date of last release:

2025-07-10

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-11-26

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been good so far. No issues.

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

Yes

Signed-off-by:

•  (kie) Brian Proffitt
  Comments:
•  (kie) Claus Ibsen
  Comments:
•  (kie) Andrea Cosentino
  Comments: All good. Project is healthy.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

OpenServerless

OpenServerless is an open source, cloud-agnostic, serverless platform. It offers a complete environment for serverless applications development, based on Kubernetes. With Apache OpenWhisk as its FaaS engine, it provides an unified developer experience with a plethora of services (SQL or noSQL databases, key-value stores, object storage, LLMs services, function schedulers) managed by the platform's core: the operator, along with tooling (the CLI) to simplify (and interact with) deployments, integrated ide and starter application and optimized runtimes integrated with the staters.

OpenServerless has been incubating since 2024-06-17.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. reactivate the build system that was phased out because of expired cloud credits - Nuvolaris provided the resources and we requestes also
2. create a self-contained distribution that builds from sources - already in place a kit to do that creating images in a local docker and the loading into a cluster
3. embed tasks in the cli binary as we cannot distribute something that self-updates from the cloud

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

we are asking for resources to AWS to test in cloud

How has the community developed since the last report?

New contributors and more adopters, including cloud providers like the Italian Government Cloud, the Polo Strategico Nazionale and 2 cloud italian

How has the project developed since the last report?

We are completing the major features like the devcontainer and the embedded registry for custom actions auto-created

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:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes

Are things falling through the cracks? If so, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

We need more visibility in the international community. We have huge visibility in Italy but basically absent outside.

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

Are 3rd parties respecting and correctly using the podlings name and brand? If not what actions has the PPMC taken to correct this? Has the VP, Brand approved the project name?

Signed-off-by:

•  (openserverless) Bertrand Delacrétaz
  Comments:
•  (openserverless) Enrico Olivelli
  Comments:
•  (openserverless) François Papon
  Comments:
•  (openserverless) JB Onofré
  Comments: Can we have an update on release ? The podling seems to struggle about growing the community and very low activity on the mailing lists. It would be great to have an update and plan.
•  (openserverless) PJ Fanning
  Comments: No obvious progress on a 1st release and podling is nearly 2 years old. Mailing list traffic is minimal. Really just GitHub automated msgs. I would disagree with the report's assertion that the podling is nearing graduation.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Otava

Apache Otava (incubating), a command-line tool, written in Python, detects and alerts about statistically significant changes in performance test results (more generally, time-series data) stored in CSV files or a number of supported databases.

A typical use-case of Otava is as follows:

1. A set of performance tests is scheduled repeatedly, such as after each commit is pushed.
2. The resulting metrics of the test runs are stored in a time series database (Graphite) or appended to CSV files.
3. Otava is launched by a Jenkins/Cron job (or an operator) to analyze the recorded metrics regularly.
4. Otava notifies about significant changes in recorded metrics by outputting text reports or sending Slack notifications.
5. Otava is capable of finding even small, but persistent shifts in metric values, despite noise in data. It adapts automatically to the level of noise in data and tries to notify only about persistent, statistically significant changes, be it in the system under test or in the environment.

Otava has been incubating since 2024-11-27. Otava entered Incubation as Hunter.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Establish frequent releases as a routine, repeatable process
2. Improve documentation to lower the entry barrier for users and contributors.
3. Define and document the desired long-term architecture. The goals of the long-term architecture are: a. Modularity: Keep the core library lightweight while making external dependencies (data sources and notification channels) pluggable. b. API stabilization: Clearly define and stabilize public interfaces prior to a 1.0.0 release.

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?

The community added one new committer and a PMC member, who contributeda a rewrite of the core changepoint detection algorithm and authored an introductory doc on changepoint detection theory in Otava.

Since the last report, there have been 4 additional contributors participated through patches and discussions. One contributor is a developer from RedPanda, who reports using Otava extensively for both continuous benchmarking and finding regressions in PRs. Another contributor developed a visualization tool that allows users to model and explore changepoint detection results across different time series. This tool improves understanding of the algorithm’s behavior and provides a practical aid for internal development and experimentation.

Additionally, open-source projects that position performance as a key feature (e.g., hardwood) have expressed interest in using Otava for continuous benchmarking.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project addressed 3 out of 4 main previously stated priorities:

1. Upgraded to supported Python versions. Re-implement the core changepoint detection algorithm and drop the dependency on signal-processing-algorithms.
2. Added a new PPMC member.
3. Publicity around the project. Since the last report, Henrik Ingo did a talk about Continuous Performance Engineering at FOSDEM 2026.

The remaining issue is making frequent releases a routine. As a first step, the project added a step-by-step release guide to facilitate repeatable releases.

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:

We are seeing a slow positive trend in community building, but not yet nearing graduation.

A self review based on https://s.apache.org/727vc

Code 5/5 Licenses and Copyright: 5/5 Releases: 5/5 Quality: 5/5 Community: 7/7 Consensus: 4/5 (Missing: CS10) Independence: 2/2 Brand: 4/4

Date of last release:

2025-12-12

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

March 2 2026

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes.

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

VP, Brand approved the new project name in February 2025. Our life as an ASF incubating project really only started after that date. We are not aware of any trademark issues related to the new project name.

Signed-off-by:

•  (otava) Dave Fisher
  Comments:
•  (otava) Enrico Olivelli
  Comments:
•  (otava) Lari Hotari
  Comments:
•  (otava) Mick Semb Wever
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

PouchDB

PouchDB is an open-source JavaScript database inspired by Apache CouchDB that is designed to run well within the browser.

PouchDB has been incubating since 2025-04-15.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Making a release
2. Adding contributors
3. Finish infrastructure migration (currently working on the website)

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

After delays last year and the promise to keep project momentum up, this has been the case.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• We have added a new committer and PPMC member.
• Work continues on a first release

How has the project developed since the last report?

We have migrated our website tech to a more modern platform that can make use of the ASF website hosting infrastructure. Final steps are taken at the moment of writing.

We also have received multiple external contributions from people previously not affiliated with the project at a volume and quality that exceeds the usual pace.

Finally, we have formalised our stance on LLM-generated code.

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:

n/a

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

January 28th 2026

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors continue to be active and helpful

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

PPMC have not yet requested a Podling Suitable Names Search

Signed-off-by:

•  (pouchdb) PJ Fanning
  Comments:
•  (pouchdb) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments: Any plan for a first release ?

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

GeaFlow

GeaFlow is a streaming graph computing engine for distributed large-scale real-time graph storage and analysis. It supports trillion-level graph storage, hybrid graph and table processing, real-time/offline graph computing, and interactive graph analysis.

GeaFlow has been incubating since 2025-06-06.

Two most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Cultivate a more diverse community by engaging contributors and committers from varied organizations and global regions.
2. Implement predictable release cycles and maintain high project stability to encourage broad participation and adoption.

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?

The GeaFlow community has maintained its core contributor base over the past month, with existing contributors continuing to drive development. The community has remained active with ongoing contributions including new features, optimizations, and bugfix. Additionally, several PRs are currently under review.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Over the past month, the GeaFlow project has continued its progress with a focus on feature enhancements, code quality improvements, and infrastructure updates. Key developments include:

• Introduced the CASTS operator to enhance GeaFlow's reasoning capabilities within the AI component (#737).
• Refactored varint encoding/decoding constants to improve code readability and maintainability (#744).
• Updated repository references in documentation to reflect the official Apache location (#746).
• Fixed typos in log messages and comments across multiple files (#752).
• New issues were opened, covering topics such as architecture design, documentation consistency, contributor guidance, and potential overflow bugs, indicating active community scrutiny and roadmap discussions.

These updates demonstrate continued advancement in Graph+AI functionality, codebase health, project branding alignment, and community-driven evolution.

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:

The last version was released on November 19, 2025.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

The last committers were elected on January 4, 2026.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, we have received helpful guidance.

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

N/A.

Signed-off-by:

•  (GeaFlow) Willem Ning Jiang
•  (GeaFlow) xinwang
•  (GeaFlow) lzljs3620320
•  (GeaFlow) jmclean
•  (GeaFlow) paulk

IPMC/Shepherd notes: