Hi folks,

Now that we just got a major release out (and NiFi Registry, MiNiFi Java, and 
NiFi FDS releases as well), I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasize the 
strengths that our community brings to the table. We have committers and 
contributors with a wide range of expertise who are able to provide wonderful 
features to the project. I think something that is sometimes difficult with our 
distributed and very busy community is balancing a proper review process with 
bringing down the PR backlog and ensuring we keep the community and development 
active.

As supported by the Powered by NiFi page [1], Twitter, and many presentations 
at conferences around the world, a number of organizations depend on NiFi for 
mission critical uses. While Apache software is provided without warranty, we 
have an obligation to our users to provide the best software possible. The 
infamous Equifax breach was due to an unpatched deployment of Apache Struts [2] 
which had a vulnerability. The resulting media coverage was obviously unkind to 
both entities.

With this in mind, all code reviews must be thorough and to the best of the 
community’s ability. We all bring excellent skills to the table, and this makes 
the community stronger. Doing a simple license check and running the maven 
build to ensure unit tests and contrib-check still pass is not sufficient. Any 
code that comes into the core codebase must now be supported by the community 
at large moving forward. We use a Review-Then-Commit (RTC) process, which is 
different from some other Apache projects. Because of this, our process should 
be proactive and perform extensive testing and evaluation before any code is 
committed. This doesn’t just apply to feature work; NiFi is a large codebase, 
and core refactoring can have serious performance and behavioral interaction 
with other components. There is an ongoing effort to refactor pieces to be more 
interdependent and to adhere to the clearly defined internal framework vs. 
extension points and exposed API.

All of this to say our vibrant community has delivered some incredible features 
and performance improvements, and it is important to continue pushing NiFi to 
be the best project it can be and ensure that we give all of our users the best 
experience possible.


[1] https://nifi.apache.org/powered-by-nifi.html 
<https://nifi.apache.org/powered-by-nifi.html>
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/equifax-breach-no-excuse/

Andy LoPresto
[email protected]
[email protected]
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