|Author: oschina
|Reprinted from: Kaiyuan China
|Editor: Wang Yuemin
|Designer: Liu Yingjie
Introduction of Kaiyuan News Agency
In 2015, there were only three Apache projects originating from China. Five years later, in 2020, there were 20 projects, including 11 top projects, and the incubation project was a new Pegasus donated by Xiaomi. The rapid development momentum is gratifying. And Apache APISIX, which has just graduated from the incubation project to become a top project, is worth taking a look at the 15 month step by step and mental journey of its successful graduation, from starting to think, choosing foundations, entering the incubator, attracting contributors, developing and thriving communities.
As the incubator IPMC and ASF member who cast the+1 vote for graduation of the APISIX incubation project, I have witnessed the power of open source from China, another step based in China and contributing to the world. I feel the same and proud!
The following are in alphabetical order
Top level project (TLP: 11)
。 Apache APISIX (latest graduation)
。 Apache CarbonData
。 Apache Dubbo
。 Apache Eagle
。 Apache Griffin
。 Apache HAWQ
。 Apache Kylin
。 Apache RocketMQ
。 Apache ServiceComb
。 Apache ShardingSphere
。 Apache Skywalking
Incubating 9
。 brpc
。 DolphinScheduler
。 Doris
。 ECharts
。 IotDB
。 MesaTEE
。 Pegasus (latest addition)
。 TubeMQ
。 Weex
Liu Tiandong Ted, ASF Member | Director and co-founder of Kaiyuan Society
On July 15, ASF officially announced that Apache APISIX graduated from the incubator and was promoted to the top project.
If you take a look at the development track of APISIX, you will find that it is growing very fast. Open source not only makes APISIX fast
Fast iteration has become a business card for the start-ups behind it to communicate with paying users.
In April last year, project sponsors Wen Ming and Wang Yuansheng started to write code. In June of the same year, they announced open source. In July, APISIX was included in the CNCF panorama. In October, it was donated to ASF. By June this year, it was voted. In July, it officially became a top project, which took only one year and three months.
During this period, commercial landing was also accompanied—— Two months after open source, the first paid central enterprise user is welcomed 。 Up to now, APISIX has more than 1000 online environmental services nodes, including Tencent, NetEase, Shell, Youxin used cars and other large or high traffic users.
"APISIX is the fastest API gateway at present", Wang Yuansheng said that they will try to reuse mature components in the initial selection, stand on the shoulders of giants, and avoid making wheels themselves, so that they can focus their time and energy on differences, such as extreme performance routing, hot plug-ins, high-performance field validators, plug-in choreography and other API gateway cores.
Unlike most API gateways, APISIX can handle not only north-south traffic, but also east-west traffic and microservice traffic. In the next quarter, APISIX plans to implement relevant functions in the Service Mesh field. In the plan of the two sponsors, APISIX will also become the most popular open source API gateway.
Two people for two months, built an API gateway that can also manage the traffic between microservices
The original intention of many open source projects is that developers find that they need a certain service when working, but there is no suitable project in the market to support them, so they develop and open source on their own to fill the gap, and APISIX is no exception.
"We need a high-performance, cloud native API gateway", Wang said, according to a survey report released by the Academy of Communications last year, 60% of Chinese enterprises are doing microservice transformation, and API gateways are very important in the microservice system, playing the role of "conductor"; At the same time, microservices are becoming more and more popular, and the traditional single application scenarios are gradually decreasing, while Cloud Native again provides some standardized solutions for the evolution of microservices. Against this background, they decided to launch the APISIX project.
The subsequent competitive product analysis also showed them the opportunity. In 2019, Gartner released a report titled "Magic Quadrant of Full Life Cycle API Management", which showed that in the magic quadrant, many major manufacturers such as Google's Apigee, some of the core API gateway technology stacks are generally older; The companies that have advantages in technical solutions are all new companies. "This once made us feel excited, and there was a feeling of opportunity in front of us," said Wang Yuansheng.
In order to build a high-performance API gateway, the APISIX core code follows the principle of simplification. In the words of Academician Wang, bloat is basically irrelevant to high-performance.
When APISIX was open source on June 6, 2019, there were only a few thousand lines of core code. After a year of development, the amount of plug-in code has already exceeded the core part. Maintaining simplicity can greatly reduce the cost of later maintenance, especially for open source projects.
Wang Yuansheng introduced that core simplification, function and innovation are indispensable. For example, APISIX's built-in var reading acceleration increases repeated reading of the same Nginx variable by a hundredfold. With the help of the radius tree (cardinality tree) method to match routes, APISIX is now the fastest API gateway for route matching.
Now, APISIX maintains the update frequency of releasing one version every one to two months.
In 2019, when APISIX donated to ASF, it also completed the main framework of APISIX, such as dynamic load balancing, full platform support, security plug-ins, SSL, gRPC, TCP/UDP dynamic proxy, stand-alone mode and other functions.
"These function implementations are written in accordance with the production standards, with full test case coverage. As of July 9, the version that users still run in the production environment is the version in November last year, with very good stability and performance 2-10 times that of similar products," said Wang Yuansheng.
This year, APISIX will continue to enrich the ecosystem. In addition to enriching functional plug-ins with the community step by step, it has also added the implementation of Dashboard and k8s ingress controller to help k8s users manage portal traffic more simply and efficiently. In addition, it innovatively adds a plug-in orchestration mechanism to APISIX, improves the linkage between plug-ins, and expands user scenarios.
25 votes in favor, it only took one year from its birth to becoming the top project of ASF
After a graduation vote in ASF, the project received a comprehensive inspection.
The graduation vote of APISIX was passed by 25+1 (affirmative) votes, including 10 Binding votes, 15 Non Binding votes, and no - 1 (negative) votes.
Apache partial voting rules ：
Apache's voting process may look a bit weird. Voting is represented by a number between - 1 and+1. "- 1" means "veto", and "+1" means "approve".
Binding Votes， Binding voting. Generally, PMC members have formal and binding votes; IPMC (Incubator PMC) owns Binding Votes for graduation voting of projects graduated from incubators. Community members' voting is non binding voting, but community members are usually encouraged to vote, even if their voting is only advisory.
In ASF, if you want to graduate to become a top project, voting is the last step of confirmation. Although this is the decision vote for graduation, in addition to obtaining enough Binding+1 votes, you also need to check whether the project's own activity, whether it has independently released versions, number of contributors, distribution of contributors, License, brand, etc. meet Apache requirements.
In the incubation voting of ASF, the voting of IPMC will be recorded and referenced, and only their voting is valid binding. Since the mailing list is public, it is also possible to vote for non PMC people. Their votes are non binding. For - 1 vote, some representatives do not support it. At this time, the voters must give full reasons. APISIX graduated with no objection.
Not only did the voting pass smoothly, but since the attempt to donate, APISIX has been very congenial to ASF.
In September 2019, Wang Yuansheng and Wen Ming decided to start donating the project to ASF. At that time, they read the contents of the Apache official website, sorted out all the inspection items one by one as required, and prepared APISIX donation materials in advance.
"With the recommendation of Jiang Ning, a technical expert of Huawei's Open Source Competency Center, we participated in a small Apache conference, and gave the information we prepared in advance to Craig Russell, the chairman of Apache, to determine whether we met the requirements, and told them that we were still short of mentor. Justin Mclean, who attended the conference at that time Say, 'I'll be your mentor'. So we found all championships and mentor ", Wang Yuansheng recalled.
“
It's a good idea to attend more Apache offline conferences
”Wang Yuansheng believes that in addition to identifying with the Apache culture, he needs to interact more with "friends in the circle", increase face-to-face communication to make up for the lack of online access to information, and prevent his misunderstanding of the Apache culture.
In addition to offline mode, you can also use Apache mode—— Actively solicit advisors for your projects in the mailing list to seek incubation opportunities.
When talking about the rapid incubation and development of APISIX, Wang Yuansheng said that its rapid start had something to do with the community,
The popularity and experience accumulated in previous work directly promote the growth of APISIX
，
Some methods have proven to be very efficient
：
Online+offline: the two should be combined to make up for each other.
Find a community that matches your own, and make appropriate publicity: you can't be too straightforward here, and recommend ways to share knowledge.
Consciously cultivate new people: create some relatively simple issues for students who want to contribute.
Recruiting classes: Each time we train new students hand in hand, one-on-one help them complete the first PR submission, so that they can gradually start to contribute to the project.
Avoid private conversation: lead everyone to the mailing list or warehouse issue for communication. Knowledge needs to be precipitated and broadcast, especially for some topics of special significance.
In order to remain active, open source works need to be produced periodically, such as supporting an important function, introducing new concepts, etc. It is important to keep open source users in mind. These ideas may come from the community, or they may be irregular gatherings of the community committee.
In addition, some interesting user use processes and troubleshooting processes can be recorded and shared with the community. Let's learn some troubleshooting methods and the stories behind open source.
Let start-ups reap paid users through open source
Another feature of the APISIX project is that it is developed and quickly donated by the main person in charge of the start-up company. In fact, although open source works cannot bring predictable sales revenue to enterprises, they may transform the technical service capabilities of enterprises into revenue drivers.
"For a small start-up like us, we have an open source identity and the best gateway works in the industry. On the contrary, it is easier for more users to know about us and become paying users." On the choice of commercialization and open source, Wang Yuansheng believes that open source pays more attention to long-term benefits.
Currently based on APISIX Enterprise version starts external trial. The charging mode is mainly based on the number of API requests 。 Wang Yuansheng said, "Since the ToB model will not start too soon, in the short term, customers with high business value will be more valued to polish the products, and efforts will be made to cultivate APISIX into a widely used, popular and easy-to-use open source API gateway."
Of course, APISIX open source is first and foremost a personal decision of developers. Since 2015, Wang Yuansheng and Wen Ming have had more contact with open source culture and communities, and they have also grown rapidly in community exchanges. Re implement APISIX and donate it to ASF. In addition to dissatisfaction with the scalability and performance of existing gateways, they also hope to share the products accumulated over the years.
In July last year, APISIX was included in the CNCF panorama, but APISIX did not enter the CNCF incubation“ ASF is more pastoral and ideal, friendly to individual developers, and has a clear elite management mechanism of committer, contributor and PMC ”Wang Yuansheng explained that they are some idealistic young entrepreneurs who want to do something valuable for the society and programmers, so they decided to choose ASF from the beginning.
Now, APISIX has officially become the top project of ASF. It can be predicted that more developers will join in the maintenance of the project. We also expect APISIX's open source ecosystem to be more perfect.
Wang Yuansheng , the initiator of the APISIX project, the co-founder of Shenzhen Branch Science and Technology, and an open-source preacher. He is more loyal to the traffic management direction with high requirements for performance and traffic.
Introduction to Kaiyuan News Agency
The Open Source Society is a manufacturer neutral, volunteer and non-profit open source alliance organized by enterprises, communities and individuals at home and abroad who support open source in accordance with the principle of "contribution, consensus and co governance", aiming to jointly create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem and promote the Chinese open source community to become an active participant and contributor of global open source software. We focus on open source governance, international integration, community development and open source projects.
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