Discussion about the Storm proposal has subsided, issues raised now
seemingly resolved.
I'd like to call a vote to accept Storm as a new Incubator podling.
The proposal is included below and is also at:
https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/StormProposal
Let's keep the vote open for four working days, until 18 September.
[ ] +1 Accept Storm into the Incubator
[ ] +0 Don't care.
[ ] -1 Don't accept Storm because...
Doug
= Storm Proposal =
== Abstract ==
Storm is a distributed, fault-tolerant, and high-performance realtime
computation system that provides strong guarantees on the processing
of data.
== Proposal ==
Storm is a distributed real-time computation system. Similar to how
Hadoop provides a set of general primitives for doing batch
processing, Storm provides a set of general primitives for doing
real-time computation. Its use cases span stream processing,
distributed RPC, continuous computation, and more. Storm has become a
preferred technology for near-realtime big-data processing by many
organizations worldwide (see a partial list at
https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Powered-By). As an open
source project, Storm’s developer community has grown rapidly to 46
members.
== Background ==
The past decade has seen a revolution in data processing. MapReduce,
Hadoop, and related technologies have made it possible to store and
process data at scales previously unthinkable. Unfortunately, these
data processing technologies are not realtime systems, nor are they
meant to be. The lack of a "Hadoop of realtime" has become the biggest
hole in the data processing ecosystem. Storm fills that hole.
Storm was initially developed and deployed at BackType in 2011. After
7 months of development BackType was acquired by Twitter in July 2011.
Storm was open sourced in September 2011.
Storm has been under continuous development on its Github repository
since being open-sourced. It has undergone four major releases (0.5,
0.6, 0.7, 0.8) and many minor ones.
== Rationale ==
Storm is a general platform for low-latency big-data processing. It is
complementary to the existing Apache projects, such as Hadoop. Many
applications are actually exploring using both Hadoop and Storm for
big-data processing. Bringing Storm into Apache is very beneficial to
both Apache community and Storm community.
The rapid growth of Storm community is empowered by open source. We
believe the Apache foundation is a great fit as the long-term home for
Storm, as it provides an established process for community-driven
development and decision making by consensus. This is exactly the
model we want for future Storm development.
== Initial Goals ==
* Move the existing codebase to Apache
* Integrate with the Apache development process
* Ensure all dependencies are compliant with Apache License version 2.0
* Incremental development and releases per Apache guidelines
== Current Status ==
Storm has undergone four major releases (0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8) and many
minor ones. Storm 0.9 is about to be released. Storm is being used in
production by over 50 organizations. Storm codebase is currently
hosted at github.com, which will seed the Apache git repository.
=== Meritocracy ===
We plan to invest in supporting a meritocracy. We will discuss the
requirements in an open forum. Several companies have already
expressed interest in this project, and we intend to invite additional
developers to participate. We will encourage and monitor community
participation so that privileges can be extended to those that
contribute.
=== Community ===
The need for a low-latency big-data processing platform in the open
source is tremendous. Storm is currently being used by at least 50
organizations worldwide (see
https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki/Powered-By), and is the most
starred Java project on Github. By bringing Storm into Apache, we
believe that the community will grow even bigger.
=== Core Developers ===
Storm was started by Nathan Marz at BackType, and now has developers
from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Alibaba, Infochimps, and many other companies.
=== Alignment ===
In the big-data processing ecosystem, Storm is a very popular
low-latency platform, while Hadoop is the primary platform for batch
processing. We believe that it will help the further growth of
big-data community by having Hadoop and Storm aligned within Apache
foundation. The alignment is also beneficial to other Apache
communities (such as Zookeeper, Thrift, Mesos). We could include
additional sub-projects, Storm-on-YARN and Storm-on-Mesos, in the near
future.
== Known Risks ==
=== Orphaned Products ===
The risk of the Storm project being abandoned is minimal. There are at
least 50 organizations (Twitter, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Groupon, Baidu,
Alibaba, Alipay, Taobao, PARC, RocketFuel etc) are highly incentivized
to continue development. Many of these organizations have built
critical business applications upon Storm, and have devoted
significant internal infrastructure investment in Storm.
=== Inexperience with Open Source ===
Storm has existed as a healthy open source project for several years.
During that time, we have curated an open-source community
successfully, attracting over 40 developers from a diverse group of
companies including Twitter, Yahoo!, and Alibaba.
=== Homogenous Developers ===
The initial committers are employed by large companies (including
Twitter, Yahoo!, Alibaba, Microsoft) and well-funded startups. Storm
has an active community of developers, and we are committed to
recruiting additional committers based on their contributions to the
project.
=== Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
It is expected that Storm development will occur on both salaried time
and on volunteer time, after hours. The majority of initial committers
are paid by their employer to contribute to this project. However,
they are all passionate about the project, and we are confident that
the project will continue even if no salaried developers contribute to
the project. We are committed to recruiting additional committers
including non-salaried developers.
=== Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
As mentioned in the Alignment section, Storm is closely integrated with Hadoop,
Zookeeper, Thrift, YARN and Mesos in a numerous ways. We look forward
to collaborating with those communities, as well as other Apache
communities (including Apache S4 which focuses on stateful low-latency
processing).
=== An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
Storm is already a healthy and well known open source project. This
proposal is not for the purpose of generating publicity. Rather, the
primary benefits to joining Apache are those outlined in the Rationale
section.
== Documentation ==
The reader will find these websites highly relevant:
* Storm website: http://storm-project.net
* Storm documentation: https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm/wiki
* Codebase: https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm
* User group: https://groups.google.com/group/storm-user
== Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
The Storm codebase is currently hosted on Github:
https://github.com/nathanmarz/storm.
This is the exact codebase that we would migrate to the Apache foundation.
The Storm source code is currently licensed under Eclipse Public
License Version 1.0. Some source code was contributed under a
contributor agreement based on the Sun contributor agreement (v1.5).
More recent code has been contributed under an Apache style agreement
(see https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/133901206/storm-apache-style-cla.txt).
Upon entering Apache, Storm will migrate to an Apache License 2.0 with
all contributions licensed to the Apache Foundation. In certain cases
where individuals or organizations hold copyright, we will ensure they
grant a license to the Apache Foundation. Going forward, all commits
will be licensed directly to the Apache foundation through our signed
Individual Contributor License Agreements for all committers on the
project.
storm-kafka, which lets one use Kafka as a source for Storm, will also
be submitted under the contrib folder for the Apache Storm project.
Yahoo! is also willing to move Storm-on-YARN code from github to be a
subproject of Apache Storm project. Storm-on-YARN is currently
licensed under Apache License 2.0 and receive contribution under
Apache style CLA. Upon entering Apache, Yahoo! will sign over
copyright to Apache foundation.
== External Dependencies ==
To the best of our knowledge, all of Storm dependencies (except
0MQ/JMQ) are distributed under Apache compatible licenses. Upon
acceptance to the incubator, we would begin a thorough analysis of all
transitive dependencies to verify this fact and introduce license
checking into the build and release process (for instance integrating
Apache Rat).
Storm has used 0MQ and JMQ as the default mechanism for internal
messaging layer, and 0MQ/JMQ is licensed under GNU Lesser General
Public License. Recently, we have made Storm messaging layer
pluggable, and plan to use Netty (which is licensed under Apache
License v2) as our default messaging plugin (while keep 0MQ as an
optional plugin).
== Cryptography ==
We do not expect Storm to be a controlled export item due to the use
of encryption.
Storm enable encryptions via 2 plugins:
* SASL authentication plugins … Currently, we have provide “no-op”
authentication and digest authentication. In near future, we will
introduce Kerberos authentication.
* Tuple payload serialization plugins … Storm provides plugins for
plain-object serialization and blowfish encryption.
== Required Resources ==
=== Mailing lists ===
* storm-user
* storm-dev
* storm-commits
* storm-private (with moderated subscriptions)
=== Subversion Directory ===
Git is the preferred source control system: git://git.apache.org/storm
=== Issue Tracking ===
JIRA Storm (STORM)
== Initial Committers ==
* Nathan Marz <nathan at nathanmarz dot com>
* James Xu <xumingmingv at gmail dot com>
* Jason Jackson <jason at cvk dot ca>
* Andy Feng <afeng at yahoo-inc dot com>
* Flip Kromer <flip at infochimps dot com>
* David Lao <davidlao at microsoft dot com>
* P. Taylor Goetz <ptgoetz at gmail dot com>
== Affiliations ==
* Nathan Marz - Nathan’s Startup
* James Xu - Alibaba
* Jason Jackson - Twitter
* Andy Feng - Yahoo!
* Flip Kromer - Infochimps
* David Lao - Microsoft
* P. Taylor Goetz - Health Market Science
== Sponsors ==
=== Champion ===
* Doug Cutting <cutting at apache dot org>
=== Nominated Mentors ===
* Ted Dunning <tdunning at maprtech dot com>
* Arvind Prabhakar <arvind at apache dot org>
* Devaraj Das <ddas at hortonworks dot com>
* Matt Franklin <m.ben.franklin at gmail dot com>
* Benjamin Hindman <benjamin.hindman at gmail dot com>
=== Sponsoring Entity ===
The Apache Incubator
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