The year 2020 is destined to be remembered in history. As the world’s largest open source software foundation, Apache Software Foundation leads the open source community, bringing together the world’s top developers and delivering an encouraging report. On January 1, 2021, The Apache Foundation published Apache in 2020 – By The Digits [1] on its official blog, a digital review of community development throughout 2020:

Over the past year, the Apache Software Foundation has iterated over nearly 3,500 releases across 238 projects in a variety of fields. All of the Apache Software Foundation’s open source software today contributes over $22 billion in value. Apache’s online conference attracted nearly 5,750 participants from more than 150 countries, and the two-day Apache Con attracted more than 1.5 million views.

Apache Flink, a member of the Apache Software Foundation’s 199 top projects, scored well in the report on several dimensions, including community user activity, developer activity, and discovery.

Community mailing list activity: TOP 1

Mailing list is a common channel for developers and users to communicate with each project of Apache Software Foundation. Mailing list can be divided into two channels: dev @mailing list and mailing list. We tend to use mailing list activity as a proxy for community communication activity. In 2020, Flink was # 1 in user exchange mail channel and # 2 in developer exchange channel:

In particular, the Flink community is the only one of the top 20 mailing lists to offer a Chinese language communication channel ([email protected]), and is second only to Flink’s English language mailing list in terms of activity in 2020. Since 2018, Flink has topped the mailing list in terms of activity for three consecutive years, and we are pleased to see that more and more Native Chinese speakers are making their voices heard in the open source community, making a significant impact on the global open source software community.

Commits submitted: TOP 2

The number of new commits of open source projects in the past year is a common measure of the development activity of open source projects. The Apache Software Foundation annually publishes the top five most commits from last year, and Flink ranks second in the number of new commits for 2020, behind Apache Camel, a routing engine builder. If the scope is limited to big data computing/storage, Apache Flink is definitely the most active project among developers. In our 2019 [2] and 2018 [3] annual reports, we have seen big data in the 5 most active Open Source software categories, including Flink, Hadoop, HBase, Beam, Airflow, and Spark. We’ve created the following chart to illustrate the trend (since only the TOP5 is published, some of the items will fall out in certain years) :

Apache Flink is the only big data-related open source project that has been in the TOP5 for the last three consecutive years and has been rising in the rankings.

Because the commits changed from year to year, we analyzed the number of commits in the past three years [4] and drew the following graph. The number of commits in Flink increased year to year and is expected to be strong in 2020. Further expand its advantages in big data projects.

GitHub Visits: TOP 2

In addition to being extremely active in development and user communication, the Apache Flink community is also highly visible and viewed in the Internet world. The Apache Software Foundation counted traffic to Flink’s Github page in 2020 as the second highest of all projects.

Since the Apache Software Foundation’s annual Year of Nature summary report for 2018 and 2019 does not show this metric, We found Github traffic indicators in the annual reports [5] for fiscal year 2019 (5.1-2019.4.30) and annual Reports [6] for fiscal year 2020 (5.1-2020.4.30) :

As you can see, since mid-2018, Flink has risen from the third place in total exposure views to the second place in 2020.

conclusion

Through the Apache Software Foundation’s 2020 summary, combined with the 2018 and 2019 summaries and annual reports, we can see that Flink has undoubtedly grown into one of the Apache head projects. In terms of user communication activity, development activity, and influence, it has been firmly in the TOP position of all Apache open source software projects.

At the same time, the Flink Community’s annual event Flink Forward Asia 2020 just ended, we also witnessed the rapid development of Flink community and the implementation of technological innovation and batch integration in the production environment. More and more enterprises, such as Bytedance, Xiaomi, netease and Zhihu, are exploring the use of Flink for a unified streaming and batch architecture.

The large number of Chinese developers and users is undoubtedly one of the most important reasons for its success, and as you read this, you are contributing to one of Apache’s top projects. Now, 2021 has arrived, I believe that in the New Year, Apache Flink will continue to evolve towards streaming batch integration, offline real-time integration, big data and AI integration, and achieve greater achievements!

Real-time is the future, and the Flink community is looking forward to your participation!

reference

[1] The Apache in 2020 – By The who blogs.apache.org/foundation/… [2] The Apache in 2019 – By The who blogs.apache.org/foundation/… [3] Apache in 2018 – By The who blogs.apache.org/foundation/… [4] Commits rev-list –after=”Jan 1 2020″ –before=”Jan 1 2021″ –all –no-merges –count [5 Annual report files-dist.s3.amazonaws.com/AnnualRepor… [6] Apache FY2020 annual report www.apache.org/foundation/…