Today, Pivotal announced the creation of “Geode”, the new in-memory distributed database that will form the open source core of Pivotal GemFire.
It is my pleasure to announce the really fun part of this: the beginning of “Project Geode” – the community of users of and contributors to the Geode technology.
As part of this announcement, we stated that Pivotal has submitted a proposal to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to establish and incubate Project Geode through collaborative development.
The Project Geode community will remain in a fledgeling state until such time as ASF agrees to incubate the project. However, you can already participate today in the following areas:
- Examine, build and execute the over 1 million lines of Geode source code from Pivotal PivNet site
- Learning from and contributing to developer and user content about Geode on the Project Geode community site
Project Geode is Looking for Early Contributors
In this early development stage of the Project Geode community, we are looking for early supporters and contributors to the Geode technology. We are conducting ramp up sessions for potential contributors to the code base. Geode source code is available today via a free evaluation license (registration as a PivNet user and EULA clickthrough are required).
Our hope is to start accepting direct code contribution according to the process established by ASF. Of course, while we all wait for ASF Incubator’s decision, there are many ways to support an open source software project beyond contributing code to the master branch. For Project Geode, here are some ways you can contribute today:
- Issues: Build and run Geode , and post issues on the Project Geode GitHub site.
- Documentation: Add to the documentation, and submit new articles to the wiki for best practices and user training.
- Website: Improve the projectgeode.org website itself. For now it runs out of the project GitHub, but will hopefully to migrate to ASF infrastructure should they accept the proposal to incubate Project Geode.
- Art & Design: Offer to help with art & design of Project Geode. Pivotal has donated an initial look and feel, but the logos, branding, and identity are property of the Project.
- Discuss: Start and weigh in on discussions. Currently we are hosting threaded discussions on the Project Geode Google group. It’s also common to find Stack Overflow questions covering GemFire and Geode.
- Present: Give a presentation or create a video about the project. We are already beginning to add presentations and training materials as they are created. Feel free to download and use. If you are hosting an event, put it into the community calendar on the site. If you create a new presentation, please check it into the project GitHub.
If you are interested in helping in any of these ways, and would consider doing so in the long run, we would love to get you onboard as part of our ASF incubation proposal for Project Geode. Hop on the ASF Incubator mailing list and let us know if you are interested!
Why Support Project Geode?
Many of software technologies start the adolescent stage of their life as an open source project. What doesn’t happen very often is a donation of a large, mature code base to an open source foundation. The code for Geode was developed over 12 years, and consists of over 1 million lines of code.
What’s special about the heritage of the Geode code base are the amazing feats of scale and speed achieved by commercial users of Pivotal GemFire. Pivotal GemFire started as a high speed caching tool for a new generation of super fast financial services electronic trading systems. Customers include a large number of no-longer independent investment banks, large scale travel reservation systems, and online commerce sites.
Pivotal GemFire’s success with these large-scale, real-time data intensive applications has helped to define the market segment for in-memory data grids. inventing better ways to build mission-critical transactional consistency across nodes of a distributed cluster, companies across financial, travel and commerce sectors to create global scale, real-time applications. For instance, financial services company, NewEdge was able to build a global high performance financial trading post-processing platform.
Today, we are seeing Pivotal GemFire’s success extend to support the Internet of Things movement, extending its use to a wide variety of customers in many different industrial sectors. For example, at Mobile World Congress, Pivotal showcased some examples of Pivotal GemFire at work in the connected car demo.
Support Project Geode
- Jump on the Geode ASF Incubation Proposal
- Download and build the Geode source code on GitHub
Learn More:
- See the press release: Pivotal Releases “Geode” – The In-Memory Database Powering Pivotal GemFire
- Financial Case Studies: SBI Securities and Newedge rely on Pivotal GemFire to build state of the art, real-time online trading systems.
- Commerce Case Study: Gire which runs a network of 4,000 smart payment kiosks in Argentina
- Travel Case Studies: China Railways & India Railways which run nationwide digital ticketing applications for train passengers for the two most heavily used railway systems in the world. Similarly, Southwest Airlines runs 80% of its ticketing reservations through a Pivotal GemFire powered system.
- View more customer stories at: pivotal.io/customers.
- Check out more blogs on Pivotal GemFire on the Pivotal blog here.
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