Apache SkyWalking's proposal into the Incubator has been voted on and accepted by Apache Software Foundation(ASF) IPMC.
SkyWalking is an APM (application performance monitor) tool, especially designed for microservices, cloud native and container-based architectures. SkyWalking’s underlying technology is a distributed tracing system, originally created as an open source project by Sheng Wu in 2015.
During two years of developments, SkyWalking actively built, through feedback and collaboration, a successful open source community. This includes today contributions from its PMC members, committers and contributors. SkyWalking growth only continues, going from strength to strength. And a number of companies have become involved behind the scenes: Huawei DevCloud, Tydic, dangdang.com and jd.com, contributing developer time and resources.
In November 2017, the SkyWalking community formalized its decision to seek to join the ASF, with hopes towards being more open, global, an even better open source APM system, and further re-enforcement to be a project that puts community over code, with the ultimate aim of crafting a compelling and broadly applicable open source APM system.
Apache projects originating in China have usually started life in big companies. SkyWalking's origin was small and through its community grew to where it is today. We still have a lot of things to improve. Joining the Apache Incubator is seen as an exciting new journey for SkyWalking.
So, we are all deeply honored to be joining the ASF, and have received many congratulations from around the world:
"SkyWalking came onto to the distributed tracing scene in 2015, challenging existing solutions in its ability to automatically instrument applications. Instrumentation is unquestionably the most time-consuming part of establishing a distributed tracing solution into an existing platform. I got to code with some of the SkyWalking community earlier on in the OpenTracing java library and could see the quality being invested back them. Recently SkyWalking reached out looking for mentors and a champion to help them create a proposal to become an Apache project. Apart from being honored and excited at the opportunity to bring the project in as a podling into the Apache Incubator, I was pleasantly surprised to see how prepared, and ASF-like, the SkyWalking community and project had already become. Creating the proposal and getting it voted positively on was a remarkably easy task. Apache SkyWalking now becomes an even more promising offering in the distributed tracing space, and continues Apache's embrace of Chinese open source communities in the shadows of Apache Kylin and Luke Han. "
- Mick Semb Wever, Apache member
"I've followed SkyWalking since discovering it a year or two ago. Joining the ASF is a good turn for an already collaborative project. I'm glad to see a strong performance management tool in the ASF portfolio"
- Adrian Cole, OpenZipkin lead
"SkyWalking has grown remarkably quickly in a short period of time, and it’s no wonder why: it doesn’t just implement a distributed tracing system, but actually focuses on important workflows and the end-user experience. This is as important as it is rare for open-source monitoring technology, and suggests great things to come for the project. SkyWalking has also been supportive of OpenTracing and contributed valuable use cases and ideas to the standard. "
- Ben Sigelman
Author of Google Dapper Paper
CNCF OpenTracing co-creator
"With the development of agile development, DevOps and Cloud technology, more and more teams and companies choose to use Cloud DevOps platform. And SkyWalking, as a cloud native and container-oriented tracing system, is the very important part in Ops and OSS. Hope SkyWalking to become more powerful and maturity in ASF, for supporting high efficiency DevOps in Cloud."
- Feng Xu, CTO, Huawei DevCloud
"I am very glad to see SkyWalking to join Apache incubator. Dangdang is always interested in SkyWalking since investigate open source APM projects. SkyWalking is a simple, lightweight, well-extendable product. Contributions are always welcomed, highly valued. A lot of energy is allocated to ensure help to all wishing to contribute. Wish SkyWalking graduate soon as an ASF TLP."
- Liang Zhang, architecture director, Dangdang
"With the widespread use of microservices and cloud native architecture technologies, the application scale and the number of nodes are increasing, and the dependency complexity among applications is also getting higher and higher. Therefore, the demand for APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is getting stronger. Fortunately, SkyWalking was born, which is the excellent open source APM product, and also helps companies to understand and monitor the quality of application services, furthermore improve the stability of the business. After Skywalking joined Apache Incubator, I believe there will be more companies and individuals joining in, and Skywalking will grow bigger and stronger! "
- Charles Wang, senior technical architect, JD Finance
"First of all, congrats to SkyWalking for joining the Apache Incubator. I have been following this project since it was born in 2015. Through two years of development, SkyWalking became more powerful, the community is full of energy. Now, I am pushing SkyWalking to production use in my company with many supporters. I hope SkyWalking becomes more powerful."
- Chao Cheng, chief payment architect, China Golden Pay
"I feel so proud of the team behind SkyWalking when hearing that the best open source APM system from china has been accepted as an incubator project by ASF. I would like to congratulate Sheng and thank the team for hard work since we’re one of its beneficiaries."
- Ching Zhu, IT director, IceKredit
We have already began to develop a shiny new 5.0 version, which completes the project to a fully featured APM, and the projects original vision. The plan for version 5.0 is a release in February 2018, fingers crossed.
This post was originally published on InfoQ China.