Open Source Big Data processing and management solution for Apache Hadoop™ in use at Hortonworks, InMobi, and Talend, among others.

Forest Hill, MD –19 January 2015– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache™ Falcon™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become 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.
Apache Falcon is a data processing and management solution for Apache Hadoop™, designed for data motion, coordination of data pipelines, lifecycle management, and data discovery. Falcon provides enterprises higher quality and predictable outcomes for their data by enabling end consumers to quickly onboard their data and its associated processing and management tasks on Hadoop clusters. The platform is successfully deployed across various industries, including advertising, healthcare, mobile applications, software solutions, and technology.
"Apache Falcon solves a very important and critical problem in the big data space. Graduation to TLP marks an important step in progression of the project," said Srikanth Sundarrajan, Vice President of Apache Falcon. "Falcon has a robust road map to ease the pain of application developers and administrators alike in authoring and managing complex data management and processing applications."

"Graduation of Apache Falcon's is a proud moment for the community who came together to solve a very relevant problem of data processing and management in Hadoop ecosystem," said Mohit Saxena, CTO and co-founder InMobi, one of the largest users of Apache Falcon. "I also want to applaud the efforts of contributors, committers and user community who actively pitched in the development of Falcon and it is only because of their conviction and efforts project has graduated. I am hoping promotion of Falcon to TLP will increase the contribution and adoption across the community and help Falcon achieve newer heights." 

Falcon represents a significant step forward in the Hadoop platform by enabling easy data management. Users of Falcon platform simply define infrastructure endpoints, data sets and processing rules declaratively. These declarative configurations are expressed in such a way that the dependencies between these configured entities are explicitly described. This information about inter-dependencies between various entities allows Falcon to orchestrate and manage various data management functions.

"Falcon has evolved over the last couple of years into a mature data management solution for Apache Hadoop with many production deployments proving it to be very valuable for users to manage their data and associated processing on Hadoop clusters," said Venkatesh Seetharam, Apache Falcon Project Management Committee member. 
"As Hadoop usage patterns have matured, the highest value implementations are based on the data lake concept. Data lakes require prescriptive and reliable pipelines," explained Greg Pavlik, Vice President of Engineering at Hortonworks. "Apache Falcon represents the best and most mature --and therefore essential-- building block for modeling, managing and operating data lakes."

"Falcon has enabled our team to incrementally build up a complex pipeline comprised of over 90 processes and 200 feeds that would have been very challenging with Apache Oozie alone," said programmer Michael Miklavcic.

"I began to work on Falcon in my spare time for fun, but it quickly became interesting in relation to my job at Talend", said Jean-Baptise Onofré, Vice President of Apache Karaf and Software Architect at Talend. "As Talend DataIntegration provides features like CDC (Change Data Capture), and data notification, we are in the process of integrating Apache Falcon in Talend products." 

"Apache Falcon's graduation is a milestone for the project and a credit to its contributors. Its open, collaborative development has effected a robust community around software essential to the Hadoop ecosystem," said Chris Douglas, Falcon incubation mentor at the ASF. "By becoming a Top-Level Project, the ASF recognizes its demonstrated ability to self-govern. Congratulations to Falcon's users, to its contributors, and particularly to its new Project Management Committee on this achievement."

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Falcon 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. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Falcon, visit http://falcon.apache.org/ and @ApacheFalcon on Twitter. 

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 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 500 individual Members and 4,500 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(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow https://twitter.com/TheASF.
© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache Falcon", "Falcon", "Apache Hadoop", "Hadoop", "Apache Oozie", "Oozie", "ApacheCon", and the Apache Falcon logo are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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