Thriving Hazelcast Community Drives Adoption of Open Source IMDG
Last twelve months reveals a substantial rise in developer interaction as open source projects become more mainstream
Palo Alto, Calif., April 21, 2016 – Hazelcast®, a leading provider of operational in-memory computing with tens of thousands of installed clusters and over 14 million server starts per month, today highlighted the continued popularity of its open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) platform by revealing Hazelcast community growth numbers from their Github repository, version control and social networking for open source software development management, for the last sixteen months. In just the last four months of 2016, Hazelcast has documented 10 new contributors, a 56% increase year-over-year in Github Stars and an 80% increase year-over-year in the number of Forks in the first quarter of 2016. In all, more developers than ever are contributing to Hazelcast developments in the Github repository and increasing the rate of new feature launches.
The increase in Github activity has resulted in a tremendous spike in Hazelcast usage, evidenced by Maven downloads which have increased by 72% year-over-year in Q1 2016. In addition, Hazelcast can disclose a 62% Q1 2016 year-over-year increase in server phone home pings which are indicative of productive Hazelcast clusters.
Also, in the first quarter of 2016, the Hazelcast community has built critical integration extending the Hazelcast computing platform to new programming languages with community developed clients, as well as community developed integrations paving the way for Hazelcast cloud deployment readiness. Specifically, the community has added useful functionality to new clients such as Clojure, Scala, Python, PHP, Node.js and Golang. In addition, Hazecast community members have driven integrations for cloud discovery for Apache jclouds, Azure, consul, etcd, Kubernetes and Zookeeper.
Christoph Engelbert, Manager Developer Relations at Hazelcast, said: “For an open source project to succeed you have to positively engage with an active community, which is what we have strived to do over the last eight years. Things have really taken off with the cloud and programming language integrations in the latest 3.6 release. We rely on ideas, contributions and help from the community and always make ourselves available for any requests or queries that come in.”
The increase in community adoption runs in parallel with the Hazelcast Enhancement Proposal (HEP), a process which was created to enable more community participation. Using HEP, Hazelcast drives community-based development of features and extensions. Members can submit new ideas or join other HEPs to create new features and help define how projects evolve. It is also far easier to work on just that part of Hazelcast you want. Hazelcast is now broken in many modules each of which can be worked on independently. Each of the languages, cloud discovery plugins and integrations are separate modules.
The rise in Hazelcast adoption should not be surprising considering changing corporate attitudes to open source projects. Open source projects underpin services offered by Facebook and Twitter, and open source operating systems, such as Linux, power many corporate servers, financial trading platforms and Android phones. In 2015, at least 110 private companies based on open source had raised more than $7 billion from venture capitalists, more than double the funding tally in 2013.
“These figures are representative of a vibrant Hazelcast community which shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the evidence reflects a more mature and stable tribe of community members and contributors,” said Greg Luck, CEO of Hazelcast. “Our main goal is to maintain the momentum, listen and interact with the community and most importantly keep things simple, which is what makes our software so accessible.”
To download the latest version of Hazelcast, go to www.hazelcast.com.