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.  Additionally, it now provides options to host the platform components as Docker containers on various Container Frameworks such as Mesos, Kubernetes, and Compose.
 
OpenWhisk has been incubating since 2016-11-23.
   Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:    

  1. Improve release automation to decrease manual steps in creating release artifacts.

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

    2. We have made the initial releases of 12 core software components.  In the process we have developed some release automation, but there is a need to further automate the process and formalize the mechanisms for make a coordinated release of all components.

  2. Increase additional company and individual Contributors to maintain all project repos. and address Issue / PR backlog.

  3. Close legal transferred of Trademark handoff for "OpenWhisk" name and logo to ASF

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

  • Issue backlog building on incubator-openwhisk is still a major issue (partly due to #2 above). As of this report, the "open" issue backlog on the "main" platform repo is 397 (up from 384 as of last report). The open PR count on the main repo has held steady at around 30 (down from 50+ 6 months ago), but still 1/3 of the ready-to-merge PRs are more than 1 month old.  The PR and Issue backlog on other project repositories is generally much lower and of less concern than the Issue backlog on the main repo.

    • Need to prioritize and work to reduce while advancing major proposals around restructuring around abstractions to accommodate running on Knative while enhancing support for better logging/scheduling and performance testing enhancements.

    • Trying to add more active Committers to augment those who have dropped off in their activity; however, we have reached an impasse where potential new Contributor pull requests are not getting timely reviews/merges.  We have potential new Contribs. to front-end Runtimes we will look to nominate ASAP, but we still lack back-end Contribs.

  • The project is still working on establishing an open staging environment to enable proper testing without depending on closed testing infrastructure at involved companies. Unfortunately, even after finally arranging a corporate donation to the ASF in June to support this need, it took until late October for Apache Infra to finish provisioning the machines.

  • Formal hand-off of OpenWhisk trademark/logo from IBM needs to be executed; need to identify process for this. See #3 above.

    • Discussion started w/ Apache legal via "legal-discuss" mailing list with subject "Trademark handoff for "OpenWhisk" name and logo".

    • IBM intends to hand-off ownership of trademarks at time of graduation.

  • Announcements from Google (Knative) in late July and AWS (Firecracker) just last week apply pressure on our community in order to both explain to developers/operators how OW is differentiated from, as well as compatible with, both popular providers’ frameworks.


How has the community developed since the last report?    


How has the project developed since the last report?

Emphasis on these areas have been featured since last report:

  • Google Knative

    • Knative and the general popularity of Kubernetes is driving the community to design and document how OW can be compatible with Knative concepts of “Serving”, “Build” and “Eventing”.  Primarily we are increasing our friendliness to the Kube community to hopefully attract more developers to help us by improving Kube deployment docs and configs. for both developers and operators to more easily “get started”.

    • Proposals on Wiki have stalled since Sept. need to revitalize the conversation.

  • Release process

    • Initial releases of all “core” repos (both back-end platform and front-end tooling) are complete.  We are adding the release of the new IBM donation of Composer at the time of authoring this report (currently undergoing IPMC VOTE).

    • Rename of all "packages" (lib.) names to "apache.org", see: Re: Change the package name into org.apache.openwhisk for openwhisk modules

    • We look forward to creating a unified release to assure we have a major/minor version that is tested to be compat. with one another (as now all are disparate releases).

    • Need more mentor help at getting release votes through IPMC.

  • Website revamp

    • Completed.  Now linking in critical developer and operator docs. to be friendlier and provide “how tos” / tutorials to teach OW key features such including Web Actions, Provider samples,  Added “getting started” sections for Ruby and Swift, as well as for new Docker Desktop (with Kubernetes).

  • Runtime updates:

    • ActionLoop (part of Go Runtime as of today), supports a general, very fast mechanism for creating new Runtimes (or migrating existing). See

    • New runtime for the .NET language needs to be taken “over the finish line"


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)
   [X] Community building
   [X] Nearing graduation  
   [  ] Other:  

Comments:

  • Need greater variety of contributors and contributing companies; especially on the “back-end” platform side and to align us with Knative.

  • Need more mentor help at getting release votes through IPMC with the large # of components we have now.

Date of last release:    

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?    

  • New Committers+PPMC:

    • None since last report

  • New Committers:

    • None since last report (PPMC will work on this)

Signed-off-by: 


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