OpenWhisk  
OpenWhisk is an open source, distributed Serverless computing platform able to execute application logic (Actions) in response to events (Triggers) from external sources (Feeds) or HTTP requests governed by conditional logic (Rules). It provides a programming environment supported by a REST API-based Command Line Interface (CLI) along with tooling to support packaging and catalog services.  The OpenWhisk platform components are packaged as Docker containers and can be deployed directly to Docker or deployed using Container Frameworks such as Mesos, Kubernetes, Compose, and YARN.


OpenWhisk has been incubating since 2016-11-23.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:    

  1. Close legal transfer of trademark on "OpenWhisk" name and logo to ASF from IBM.
  2. Complete project maturity model assessment and formal graduation process Project Maturity Model.

  3. Improve release automation. A comprehensive OpenWhisk release includes over 20 sub-components, each drawn from its own github repo and each packaged as a separately downloadable source release.

    1. Release process/automation/documentation are here https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk-release.

    2. During incubation, we have made over a dozen conforming Apache releases of sub-components.  We have developed reasonable automation for releasing a group of sub-components, but there is a need to further define and automate the process of making a unified release of a coherent set of released sub-components.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be aware of?    

  • Formal hand-off of OpenWhisk trademark/logo from IBM needs to be executed; hopefully this will happen at the March ASF Board meeting.

  • The podling was down to one active mentor for several months, which has made getting the required minimum of 3 positive IPMC votes for each released component a significant challenge.  This had a negative effect on project velocity and PPMC morale.  At the time of this report, the IPMC is taking action by soliciting additional mentors to help the project finish out its incubation.

How has the community developed since the last report?    

  • dev mailing list activity:

    • We have implemented an automated process to post a daily archive of the OpenWhisk Team Slack to our dev mailing list.

    • Increased use of the dev list for technical discussion, especially around releasing sub-components and ensuring awareness of significant PRs before merging.

  • incubator-openwhisk Github stars: 3,825 (+168 since last report)

  • incubator-openwhisk GitHub forks: 738 (+46 since last report)

  • Slack community:

    • 1,159 members (+87 from last report).  Very active in most channels from both end users or the project and contributors

    • To-date: 141,783 messages sent across all channels (+15,501 since last report)

    • Analytics: https://openwhisk-team.slack.com/admin/stats

  • The  bi-weekly Zoom "Technical Interchange" continues to be well received and attended.

  • New Contributors

    • 13 new ICLAs received (including some that were missed in the previous two status reports):

      • Sam Baxter 6/11/18

      • Emanuel Russo 8/6/18

      • Prabhash Rathnayake 10/2/18

      • Shawn Black 10/2/18

      • Moritz Raho 10/4/18

      • Duy Nguyen 10/4/18

      • Sam Hjelmfelt 11/21/18

      • Marc Schwind 1/28/19

      • Avi Weit 2/5/19

      • Lars Andersson 2/8/19

      • Maciej Małecki 2/26/19

      • Somaya Jamil 2/27/19
      • Erez Hadad 3/1/19

    • 5 new people Joined Community Technical Interchange calls and introduced themselves:

      • Thomas Peikert: grad. student using OW, looking to make contributions in future

      • Erez (IBM Research),  working on Serverless, incl. OW and knative, etc. (the anon person)

      • Rahul (Adobe) - working on some depl. strat.  starting a CWIKI post...

      • Lavanya (Adobe)

      • Manoj (Adobe) - SW quality engineer


How has the project developed since the last report?

There has been a focus on clearing the backlog of PRs and issues across all our github repos, motivated by a desire to make a unified release of all the OpenWhisk system sub-components.  There is still significant work needed to clear out stale issues in the core repository, but the PR backlog mentioned in multiple previous reports has been rectified.

Project technical highlights include (a) the addition of a .NET runtime component,  (b) merged support for concurrent activation processing, (c) merged support for a "lean" system configuration suited for resource-limited hosts, (d) added the capability of deploying OpenWhisk on Apache YARN, (e) the unification of the `wskdeploy` and `wsk` CLIs into a single `wsk` cli.


How would you assess the podling's maturity?  Please feel free to add your own commentary.    

   [  ] Initial setup
   [  ] Working towards first release  (nearly complete, see above)
   [  ] Community building
   [X] Nearing graduation  
   [  ] Other:  


Date of last release:    

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?    

  • New Committers+PPMC:

    • Olivier Tardieu (2/27/19)

  • New Committers:

    • Michele Sciabarra (1/8/19)

    • Rob Allen (1/8/19)

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues that need to be addressed.

Our sole remaining mentor has been helpful and responsive, but release voting has been challenging.  The recent efforts of the IPMC to identify projects needing additional mentors and should allow us to regain our desired release velocity.


Signed-off-by:

[ ] (openwhisk) Bertrand Delacretaz

Comments:


IPMC/Shepherd notes:

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