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List:       apache-announce
Subject:    The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: August-October 2015
From:       Sally Khudairi <sk () apache ! org>
Date:       2015-11-28 16:06:13
Message-ID: 715211818.19563438.1448726773555.JavaMail.yahoo () mail ! yahoo ! com
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> > this announcement is available online at http://s.apache.org/M0R 


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, Shane Curcuru, \
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. 

[please refer to image at \
https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/mediaresource/09822d33-73a6-44bd-b764-952ae9f7f5f2 \
] 


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: 


[please refer to the image at \
https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/mediaresource/91325e5c-3e14-497c-aefb-56ddf19051ff \
] 

> 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. 

# # # 


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. \
For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit \
http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, and the @TheASF \
feed on Twitter.  (c) The Apache Software Foundation 2015 

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