Two open source data infrastructure projects graduate from the Apache Incubator, signalling stronger community maturity while boosting big-data performance and interoperability across modern data platforms.
Two major open source data infrastructure projects—Apache Gluten and Apache Polaris—have graduated from the Apache Incubator to become Top-Level Projects (TLPs) at the Apache Software Foundation. The move marks a significant milestone for both projects, reflecting strong community governance, project maturity, and sustainable open source development within the Apache ecosystem.
Apache Gluten is an open source middle-layer plugin designed to accelerate SQL and DataFrame workloads in Apache Spark. It improves performance by offloading compute-intensive operations from Spark’s JVM-based environment to high-performance native engines such as Velox and ClickHouse. The architecture is also extensible, enabling future integration with ASF technologies including Apache DataFusion. The result is faster analytics processing and lower costs for big-data workloads.
“Graduating to an Apache Top-Level Project represents an important step forward for Gluten,” said Weiting Chen, PMC Chair. “We are committed to building a solution that makes Spark faster and more efficient, enabling better real-time analytics and lower costs for big data workloads.”
Meanwhile, Apache Polaris is an open source catalog implementation for Apache Iceberg. By implementing Iceberg’s REST API, it enables interoperability across multiple data engines, including Apache Doris, Apache Flink, Apache Spark, Dremio OSS, StarRocks, and Trino.
“This promotion to Top-Level Project status highlights the maturity of the Polaris community and its technology,” said Jean-Baptiste Onofré, PMC Chair. “Our community is excited to continue providing new levels of choice, flexibility, and control over data.”
Projects enter Apache through the Incubator as “podlings”, where they receive mentorship and governance guidance before graduating as independent projects. The ASF supports a wide ecosystem of open source software including Apache Airflow, Apache Camel, Apache Cassandra, Apache Groovy, Apache HTTP Server, and Apache Kafka.
