The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: May-July 2015
"ASF is now the go to governance organisation for West Coast code, and the Web Companies there are building a ton of interesting stuff. Apache may seem boring and consensual but those are often virtues when creating standards… clearly they have plenty of runway ahead of them." –James Governor, Analyst and Co-founder, RedMonk
> President's Statement: This quarter has been another one of growth for the Foundation. We've accepted new projects into the Incubator, graduated projects out of the Incubator and as Top-Level Projects. Our operations teams have continued to expand their responsibilities and streamline processes in order to help ensure that our volunteers within our projects can focus on code development. One important step taken in this last month is to move some of our contractors to a Professional Employment Organization. This ensures that the Foundation's relationship with its staff is further strengthened and that our volunteers in operational roles are able to focus more key strategic issues while staff ensure day to day operations are well cared for.
Our Infrastructure team, despite the ongoing effort to address technical debt, have met their SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for all services in this quarter. The team have automated the collection and publishing of their performance against these SLAs. This data is published at http://status.apache.org/sla/ It is noticeable, in these graphs, that uptime for most services is improving as the team complete work on upgrading our infrastructure. This is a direct result of an increased Foundational budget for the Infrastructure team.
Planning for our Europe conference in Budapest in September/October is now complete. This year we have split the conference into Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon Core. The Core event follows a similar structure to the traditional ApacheCon events, spanning all Apache communities. This is a great opportunity to learn about The Foundation, The Apache Way and the breadth of our communities' work. Apache: Big Data is a more focused event which showcases Apache projects that are leading Big Data movement. The two events are in the same location and for a natural complement to one another. We look forward to a very successful event. In particular we look forward to welcoming those joining us through our Travel Assistance Committee (representatives from Korea, France, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Australia, Netherlands, India, Denmark, China, Toronto and France). Planning for Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core North America in Vancouver, Canada May 9-13th is now well underway.
From a budget perspective, the Foundation remains in good health. As always, more sponsors will enable us to do more for our projects. However, we are currently maintaining a healthy cash reserve while increasing spending in a controlled way to strengthen the foundations operational aspects as described. In this quarter we have welcomed a number of new sponsors to the fold. As always these sponsors recognize the importance of The Apache Software Foundation as a vendor-neutral location for software collaboration. We continue to be grateful to our sponsors who willingly donate to the foundation with "no strings attached" in order to ensure that we can maintain our neutrality.
> Open Innovation: Five new projects entered the Apache Incubator: Atlas (Big Data), CMDA - Climate Model Diagnostic Analyzer (Web Services/Data Analytics), Cotton (Database Framework), FreeMarker (Java Template Engine), and Trafodion (Big Data). Apache NiFi (Cloud Computing) graduated from the Incubator as a Apache Top-Level Project.
In addition, whilst outside the official reporting time period, it is important to highlight Apache Zest (Composite Oriented Programming) for becoming the first project to enter the ASF as a pTLP –provisional Top-Level Project– without entering the Apache Incubator. As part of its eligibility, Apache Zest had to meet the rigorous requirements of the Apache Maturity Model http://s.apache.org/O4p , which addresses the integrity of a project's code, copyright, licenses, releases, consensus building, and independence, among other qualities. Apache Zest became an official ASF Top-Level Project in March 2015.
To provide developers and users with in-depth information on all projects under the Apache umbrella, the ASF Infrastructure team redesigned the Apache Projects page https://projects.apache.org/projects.html, which offers extensive details on the projects themselves, their Committers, and many more interesting and relevant facts throughout the ASF's history.
> Infrastructure: During this quarter, in addition to the managing ongoing operations and routine requests, and driving forward our primary objectives. Infrastructure has most heavily focused on improving monitoring and reporting, and made significant strides in that objective.
Logging: We've moved from a very early proof of concept to deploying a production instances of centralized log management. Our dashboard allows us to quickly find visualize issues and trends across all of our infrastructure that used to require connecting to multiple machines and parsing log files individually. This has already made us much more efficient and given us much easier insight.
Monitoring: We've had great service availability and hardware fault monitoring for over a year, but during this quarter, we've done our initial deployment of server and application monitoring. This allows us to gain deeper introspection into how our services and hardware are performing.
Reporting: We've been maintaining a status site (http://status.apache.org) for a while to give our project communities information on upcoming maintenance periods or unplanned outages. That has been very useful, but we also wanted to give insight and transparency into how infrastructure is delivering on its self-imposed Service Level Expectations, and to that end, we now publish that, in real time for folks to consume at: http://status.apache.org/sla
Of course, the day to day requests and activity are ongoing as well - notably during this quarter we eclipsed more than 10,000 requests for service in Infrastructure's Jira tracker, and we have now closed more than 10,000 requests. 494 requests were closed during the quarter.
Last year, we spent time focusing on improving our build services (Buildbot and Jenkins). We added on-demand slave provisioning, docker container slave deployment, and focused on improving the reliability of the services. This quarter has seen a dramatic uptick in demand for those services, with about 200 percent more jobs being deployed.
Finally, we did suffer a security issue on one of our build machines that involved a compromised committer account. The machine in question wasn't used to actually build software. The account compromised was a non-privileged account, and there's no evidence of escalation of privileges. Out of an abundance of caution we rebuilt the machine from scratch as it was already on the list of hardware to be replaced this year. You can read more details here: https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/buildbot_master_currently_off_line
> Fundraising: The ASF benefits from the continued support for our sponsors. In addition to sponsors renewing their commitment for another year, we also now have RedHat Software on board. We are currently enjoying the support of the following sponsors:
Our VPs of Fundraising continued our outreach activities and maintain a open communication channels with our sponsors. Part of it are publishing quarterly reports like this one in collaboration with our VP of Marketing and Publicity. We are involved in active conversations with a number of potential sponsors who are very supportive of the ASF efforts.
Fundraising is a very important activity for the ASF, because the generosity of our sponsors is effectively what ensures the ability of the ASF to operate and grow. We want to use this opportunity to express again our gratitude.
Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity
(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2015