GridGain's In-Memory Data Fabric entered Apache Incubator last October under the name of Apache Ignite. The company donated its flagship in-memory computing (IMC) platform to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) with the intention of attracting external developers and growing a viable community around its core technology.
Founded in 2005 by Nikita Ivanov (CTO) and Dmitriy Setrakyan (VP Engineering), and employing between 30 and 50 people, GridGain is raising significant attention in the IMC market with a broad range of Fortune 500 customers such as Sony, Apple, McGrawHill, Avis, TomTom, Markit, Daiwa and Thomson Reuters. Competitors include Oracle (Coherence), IBM (WebSphere eXtreme Scale), VMWare (Gemfire), GigaSpaces (XAP), Terracotta and HazelCast.
From a technical point of view, Apache Ignite is a Java-based open-source middleware for distributed in-memory processing that comprises three core elements:
- an SQL+NoSQL key-value store with ACID transactions (In-Memory Data Grid)
- a framework to distribute any set of JVM instructions across the grid and run MapReduce-like jobs (In-Memory Compute Grid)
- an event-based processing engine (In-Memory Streaming Processing)
APIs are currently available for Java, Scala, C++ and .NET (C#).
According to Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark and CTO of DataBricks, Ignite and Spark share similar goals but "technologies are different". While Spark was specially designed for data processing, Ignite is "a more generic distributed computation middleware that lets you easily farm out arbitrary tasks to nodes".
By entering the Incubator, Ignite will have to follow Apache's rigorous legal and organizational policies and demonstrate its ability to grow a collaborative community of developers around the project. As explained in the Incubator proposal, the initial development goals "primarily revolve around migrating the existing code base, documentation, and refactoring of the existing internal build, test and release processes". No new feature has been announced.
The foundation accepted the project upon nomination by Konstantin Boudnik (Hadoop Committers and member of GridGain's advisory board) and a vote of the community on the Incubator's mailing list. A second vote will be held once the project meets ASF's requirements to become a top-level project (TLP).