Open Source Cloud quick-start toolkit in use at Cloudera, Cloudsoft, Omixon, Outerthought, and more.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF),  the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Whirr has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

First developed inside the Apache Hadoop project in 2007 to quickly start and manage clusters running on Cloud services, Whirr entered the Apache Incubator in 2010. Apache Top-Level Projects and their communities demonstrate that they are well-governed under the Foundation’s meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.

"The Whirr project has demonstrated its maturity by graduating from the Apache Incubator," explained Tom White, Vice President of Apache Whirr. "We are pleased to offer users an easy way to get services up and running on Cloud hardware in minutes."
Apache Whirr provides a Cloud-neutral way to run a properly-configured system quickly through libraries, common service API, smart defaults, and command line tool. Whirr is being used for proof of concepts and a way to try out new Cloud services utilizing a variety of Apache products that include Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, and ZooKeeper. An example of this is enterprise software providers Cloudera, who use Whirr to make it easy to try out their CDH product and run distributed clustered services.
Outerthought CEO Steven Noels said, "Outerthought was looking for a foundation framework for the enterprise cluster install tool of its Apache HBase-based Big Data platform Lily, so Apache Whirr seemed like a natural fit. Whirr lived up to its promises, and we found a welcoming and helpful development team to collaborate with. Lily is 'Smart Data at Scale, made Easy', and part of that goal is now being realized thanks to Apache Whirr."

"Omixon provides complex next-gen sequencing bioinformatic pipelines on the cloud where on demand we need to fire-up and control Apache Hadoop clusters of different sizes,” said Tibor Kiss, Senior Software Engineer at Omixon. “Whirr was the perfect integration technology between our java based infrastructure management layer and the managed Hadoop clusters. Thanks to Apache Whirr, the resulting software is stable and easy to maintain."

"Having been involved since its inception I am delighted to see Whirr graduate. Whirr has proven easy to develop against and explain to others, leading to its strong community," said Adrian Cole, Founder, jclouds and Chief Evangelist at Cloudsoft. "We are pleased to announce commercial support for Apache Whirr, as well the underlying jclouds infrastructure, is under active development at Cloudsoft and should be available by year end at the latest."

"Apache Whirr's Cloud-neutral way to run services means that developers don't have to worry about the idiosyncrasies of each provider," added White. "We encourage users to get started today with 'Whirr in 5 Minutes' and to build service plugins for additional services."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Whirr software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Whirr source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources including "Whirr in 5 Minutes" and Quick Start guides are available at http://whirr.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache" and "Apache Whirr" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Contact:
Sally Khudairi
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656