FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

Second Quarter, Fiscal Year 2016 (August-October 2015)

"From the Apache HTTP Server to Apache Spark, via Apache Hadoop, Apache Geronimo and Apache CloudStack and almost 150 other projects, the Apache Software Foundation has set the standard for modern application and infrastructure software as well as the open source collaborative processes through which it is developed." --Matt Aslett, research director, 451 Research


> President's Statement: Another quarter of growth for the ASF in almost every respect. We welcomed a number of new sponsors, organizations and individuals we remain deeply grateful to. Without these "no strings attached" sponsorships we would not be able to provide the vendor neutral collaboration space we create for our communities. Talking of money and sponsorship, did you know that from May to October this year we spent a few cents over $2,035 per project, at that spend rate we will spend a shade over $4,000 per project for the full year. Where else can you find software that changes the world for such a low overhead cost?

We manage to achieve this through our unique governance approach which rewards those who invest time and resources into our projects. For Apache cash (and the things cash can buy) is not what builds viable open source communities. At the ASF the creation and management of a vendor neutral space is the key. Over the last 20+ years our model has proven successful time and time again. That vendor neutral space enables communities of collaborating software developers to flourish, even where those individual developers are gainfully employed by competing organizations.

It is our sponsors who give us the freedom to create this space, it is our volunteers who create the communities and code within that space. We salute them all.

Talking of communities, during the last quarter, we gradated 5 incubator communities to Top Level status:

  • Apache Ignite - High-performance, integrated and distributed in-memory platform for computing and transacting on large-scale data sets in real-time
  • Apache Lens - A unified analytics platform 
  • Apache Serf - high performance C-based HTTP client library built upon the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library
  • Apache Usergrid - The BaaS Framework you run 
  • Apache Yetus - A collection of libraries and tools that enable contribution and release processes for software projects. 

We also had the honor of welcoming 5 new communities into our Incubator:

  • Apex - an enterprise grade native YARN big data-in-motion platform that unifies stream processing as well as batch processing
  • HAWQ - an advanced enterprise SQL on Hadoop analytic engine built around a robust and high-performance massively-parallel processing (MPP) SQL framework
  • MADLib - Big Data Machine Learning in SQL for Data Scientists
  • Rya - a cloud-based RDF triple store that supports SPARQL queries
  • Unomi - reference implementation of the OASIS Context Server specification

This brings the total of communities in the ASF to 171 Top Level Project communities and 44 Incubating communities. For more information on our projects see the Apache Projects Directory (https://projects.apache.org/)

We've also had a busy quarter with respect to events. ApacheCon Europe was joined by the inaugural Apache Big Data Europe in Budapest (thanks to the Linux Foundation who produce these events for us) while ApacheCon Roadshow returned to China for the first time since 2011 (thanks to KAIYUANSHE for producing this one). There have been far too many meetups around the world for us to list here, but we have a page showing the next two weeks worth of Apache related meetups (http://www.apache.org/events/meetups.html; updated weekly). Our Travel Assistance Committee helped a good number of people attend the event, an initiative that helps to ensure those not normally able to afford travel and conference tickets to engage directly with our communities – again we must thank our sponsors for their support of this work.

Finally, the Call For Papers for both Apache BigData NA (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-north-america/program/cfp) and ApacheCon Core NA (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/program/cfp) is now open. Please send us your proposals.

> Community and Events: ApacheCon EU took place in Budapest in October. This was the first time we split the event into two components, one with a Big Data focus, the other with an Apache Community focus. Combined attendance was over 600 a number kept artificially low by the political situation in the region at this time. Nevertheless, the events were a great success and we are repeated the dual conference approach for ApacheCon North America May 2016 (see http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-north-america and http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-core-north-america for CFP and registration details)

For the first time Apache will have official representation at FOSDEM in Belgium, Jan 2016. We look forward to meeting you there.

Travel Assistance for our conferences is another area that received focus this quarter. Since we partnered with the Linux Foundation to produce the Apache Con events we have been able to work with the Linux Foundation to extend support to more people by combining the Linux Foundations and our own assistance programs. We've worked to simplify the process of applying for support and look forward to supporting more people in their journey to ApacheCon in 2016 and onwards.

> Committers: One of the key roles of the ASF Secretary's office is to ensure that new committers have their paperwork processed quickly so that they can get on with writing great code within our projects. During the initial stages of contribution there is no need for any paperwork, however, once an individual is granted write access to our repositories they must submit an Individual Contributor License Agreement. This is a good measure of the growth of our foundation in terms of the number of active committers we have.

In this quarter the Secretary processed 237 ICLAs. That's 237 more people with direct write access to one or more of our projects. These individuals join the thousands of existing committers who accept and process contributions from even more thousands of contributing individuals. The activity of these committers and the community of contributors they serve can be seen at http://status.apache.org/#commits

> Brand Management: The brand management team continues to work on educational materials to help promote our many Apache project brands, as well as showing our volunteer communities effective ways to police third party use of Apache project brands.  We now have a detailed list of trademark and branding resources available for our communities as well as vendors who work with Apache projects: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources

Along with presenting on trademark basics at ApacheCon conferences, our VP of Brand Management was invited to speak on a panel discussion about community owned trademarks at Columbia Law School, at SFLC's annual conference.  Improving awareness of the importance of trademarks to our communities as well as to the Foundation is critical in ensuring long-lived and widely-contributed to software projects.

We are also continuing to seek US trademark registrations for projects that ask for one, as well as improving our ability to register selected Apache project brands in other countries with our limited budget.

> Infrastructure: During this quarter, the main focus (outside of keeping our services running) has been on improving logging and reporting from our systems. In August we reported that we had a "decent baseline of metrics". These monitoring tools are now driving an increased awareness of the performance of our core services, allowing us to focus on areas of pain for our projects. Having said that, as can be seen from the uptime graph below, our service stability has been increasing for some time, and continue to do so. We are very proud of ensuring our projects have a reliable infrastructure on which to collaborate.

For some time now we have been focusing on automating the configuration of our machine in order to allow us to more easily recover from hardware failures and to perform updates. During this quarter we saw what was probably the best example of how our monitoring and automation work is paying off. In August, we lost an LDAP server. This this caused a number of services to cease being useful. Our alerting detected the problem in a timely manner, our infra team were alerted and, thanks to our resilient architecture and configuration management, we were able to provision a new host and have it working again within 12 minutes. A 12 minute Mean-Time-to-Recovery is a stunning statistic that we are very proud to report.

We experienced a DDoS attack on our download mirror redirection CGI script – a script that redirects users who click a download link to their geographically nearest mirror. This took around 12 hours to fully resolve. The resolution included a complete rewrite of the redirection script, which has resulted in a much more efficient process.

In terms of service improvement we have been working on revamping our Mail archive infrastructure. This will provide both a more efficient processing of the huge amounts of mail traffic our projects generate as well as presenting a more useful user interface for the archives. At this time we are focusing on proof of concept work and expect to be moving to production soon.

A complete view of the status of our infrastructure, with uptime graphs, can always be viewed at http://status.apache.org/

> Financial Statement:

> Fundraising: The ASF thanks its sponsors for their continued support. Hadrian Zbarcea and Jim Jagielski, our VPs of Fundraising, continued our outreach activities and maintain open communication channels with our sponsors. This quarter we added one new silver sponsor: Private Internet Access. We also have an open dialog with a few other organization who expressed interest in sponsoring the ASF.

Currently we are enjoying the support of the following sponsors:

  • 8 Platinum Sponsors: Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, and Yahoo
  • 6 Gold Sponsors: Bloomberg, Comcast, Hewlett Packard,  Hortonworks, IBM, and PhoenixNAP
  • 10 Silver Sponsors: Budget Direct, Cerner, Huawei, InMotion Hosting, iSIGMA, Private Internet Access, Produban, Red Hat Software, Serenata Flowers, and WANDisco
  • 7 Bronze Sponsors: Accor, Basis Technology, Bluehost, Cloudsoft Corporation, Samsung, Talend, and Twitter
  • 11 Infrastructure Sponsors: OSU Open Source Labs, No-IP, Symantec, Rackspace, Ping My Box, PagerDuty, Bintray, SURFnet, Sonatype, Freie Universitat Berlin, and HotWax Systems

Fundraising is a very important activity for the ASF. The ASF experiences steady growth. Every month there are new promising projects entering the Apache Incubator as well as maturing ones that exit the Incubator to become Top-Level Projects. We rely on our sponsors' generous help for smooth operation, especially for infrastructure which is our main cost center.

We want to use this opportunity to express again our gratitude to our sponsors for being part of our journey.

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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by ASF President Ross Gardler; Shane Curcuru, Vice President Brand Management; Chris Mattmann, ASF Treasurer, and Tom Pappas, Vice President, Finance & Accounting at Virtual, Inc.; and Hadrian Zbarcea, co-Vice President of Fundraising.
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(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2015