Made few edits to the proposal (
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/IvoryProposal) as per the feedback
received so far.

Regards
Srikanth Sundarrajan

= Ivory Proposal =

== Abstract ==
Ivory is a data processing and management solution for Hadoop designed
for data motion, coordination of data pipelines, lifecycle management,
and data discovery. Ivory enables end consumers to quickly onboard
their data and its associated processing and management tasks on
Hadoop clusters.

== Proposal ==
Ivory will enable easy data management via declarative mechanism for
Hadoop. Users of Ivory platform simply define infrastructure
endpoints, data sets and processing rules declaratively. These
declarative configurations are expressed in such a way that the
dependencies between these configured entities are explicitly
described. This information about inter-dependencies between various
entities allows Ivory to orchestrate and manage various data
management functions.

The key use cases that Ivory addresses are:
 * Data Motion
 * Process orchestration and scheduling
 * Policy-based Lifecycle Management
 * Data Discovery
 * Operability/Usability

With these features it is possible for users to onboard their data
sets with a comprehensive and holistic understanding of how, when and
where their data is managed across its lifecycle. Complex functions
such as retrying failures, identifying possible SLA breaches or
automated handling of input data changes are now simple directives.
All the administrative functions and user level functions are
available via RESTful APIs. CLI is simply a wrapper over the RESTful
APIs.

== Background ==
Hadoop and its ecosystem of products have made storing and processing
massive amounts of data commonplace. This has enabled numerous
organizations to gain valuable insights that they never could have
achieved in the past. While it is easy to leverage Hadoop for
crunching large volumes of data, organizing data, managing life cycle
of data and processing data is fairly involved. This is solved
adequately well in a classic data platform involving data warehouses
and standard ETL (extract-transform-load) tools, but remains largely
unsolved today. In addition to data processing complexities, Hadoop
presents new sets of challenges and opportunities relating to
management of data.

Data Management on Hadoop encompasses data motion, process
orchestration, lifecycle management, data discovery, etc. among other
concerns that are beyond ETL. Ivory is a new data processing and
management platform for Hadoop that solves this problem and creates
additional opportunities by building on existing components within the
Hadoop ecosystem (ex. Apache Oozie, Apache Hadoop DistCp etc.) without
reinventing the wheel. Ivory has been in production at InMobi, going
on its second year and has been managing hundreds of feeds and
processes.

Ivory is being developed by engineers employed with InMobi and
Hortonworks. This platform addition will increase the adoption of
Apache Hadoop by driving data management tractable for end users. We
are therefore proposing to make Ivory an Apache open source project.

== Rationale ==
The Ivory project aims to improve the usability of Apache Hadoop. As a
result Apache Hadoop will grow its community of users by increasing
the places Hadoop can be utilized and the use cases it will solve. By
developing Ivory in Apache we hope to gather a diverse community of
contributors, helping to ensure that Ivory is deployable for a broad
range of scenarios. Members of the Hadoop development community will
be able to influence Ivory’s roadmap, and contribute to it. We believe
having Ivory as part of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem will be a great
benefit to all of Hadoop's users.

== Current Status ==
Ivory is widely deployed in production within InMobi and moving on to
its second year. A version with a valuable set of features is
developed by the list of initial committers and is hosted on github.

=== Meritocracy ===
Our intent with this incubator proposal is to start building a diverse
developer community around Ivory following the Apache meritocracy
model. We have wanted to make the project open source and encourage
contributors from multiple organizations from the start. We plan to
provide plenty of support to new developers and to quickly recruit
those who make solid contributions to committer status.

=== Community ===
We are happy to report that the initial team already represents
multiple organizations. We hope to extend the user and developer base
further in the future and build a solid open source community around
Ivory.

=== Core Developers ===
Ivory is currently being developed by three engineers from InMobi –
Srikanth Sunderrajan, Shwetha G S, and Shaik Idris, two Hortonworks
employees – Sanjay Radia and Venkatesh Seetharam. In addition, Rohini
Palaniswamy and Thiruvel Thirumoolan, were also involved in the
initial design discussions. Srikanth, Shwetha and Shaik are the
original developers. All the engineers have built two generations of
Data Management on Hadoop, having deep expertise in Hadoop and are
quite familiar with the Hadoop Ecosystem. Samarth Gupta & Rishu
Mehrothra, both from InMobi have build the QA automation for Ivory.

=== Alignment ===
The ASF is a natural host for Ivory given that it is already the home
of Hadoop, Pig, Knox, HCatalog, and other emerging “big data” software
projects. Ivory has been designed to solve the data management
challenges and opportunities of the Hadoop ecosystem family of
products. Ivory fills the gap that Hadoop ecosystem has been lacking
in the areas of data processing and data lifecycle management.

== Known Risks ==

=== Orphaned products & Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
The core developers plan to work full time on the project. There is
very little risk of Ivory getting orphaned. Ivory is in use by
companies we work for so the companies have an interest in its
continued vitality.

=== Inexperience with Open Source ===
All of the core developers are active users and followers of open
source. Srikanth Sundarrajan has been contributing patches to Apache
Hadoop and Apache Oozie, Shwetha GS has been contributing patches to
Apache Oozie.  Seetharam Venkatesh is a committer on Apache Knox.
Sharad Agarwal, Amareshwari SR (also a Apache Hive PMC member) and
Sanjay Radia are PMC members on Apache Hadoop.

=== Homogeneous Developers ===
The current core developers are from diverse set of organizations such
as InMobi and Hortonworks. We expect to quickly establish a developer
community that includes contributors from several corporations post
incubation.

=== Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
Currently, most developers are paid to do work on Ivory but few are
contributing in their spare time. However, once the project has a
community built around it post incubation, we expect to get committers
and developers from outside the current core developers.

=== Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
Ivory is going to be used by the users of Hadoop and the Hadoop
ecosystem in general.

=== A Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
While we respect the reputation of the Apache brand and have no doubts
that it will attract contributors and users, our interest is primarily
to give Ivory a solid home as an open source project following an
established development model. We have also given reasons in the
Rationale and Alignment sections.

== Documentation ==http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/IvoryProposal

== Initial Source ==
The source is currently in github repository at:
https://github.com/sriksun/Ivory

== Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
The complete Ivory code is under Apache Software License 2.

== External Dependencies ==
The dependencies all have Apache compatible licenses. These include
BSD, MIT licensed dependencies.

== Cryptography ==
None

== Required Resources ==

=== Mailing lists ===

 * ivory-dev AT incubator DOT apache DOT org
 * ivory-commits AT incubator DOT apache DOT org
 * ivory-user AT incubator apache DOT org
 * ivory-private AT incubator DOT apache DOT org

=== Subversion Directory ===
Git is the preferred source control system: git://git.apache.org/ivory

=== Issue Tracking ===
JIRA IVORY

== Initial Committers ==
 * Srikanth Sundarrajan (Srikanth.Sundarrajan AT inmobi DOT com)
 * Shwetha GS (shwetha.gs AT inmobi DOT com)
 * Shaik Idris (shaik.idris AT inmobi DOT com)
 * Venkatesh Seetharam (Venkatesh AT apache DOT org)
 * Sanjay Radia (sanjay AT apache DOT org)
 * Sharad Agarwal (sharad AT apache DOT org)
 * Amareshwari SR (amareshwari AT apache DOT org)
 * Samarth Gupta (samarth.gupta AT inmobi DOT com)
 * Rishu Mehrothra (rishu.mehrothra AT inmobi DOT com)

== Affiliations ==
 * Srikanth Sundarrajan (InMobi)
 * Shwetha GS (InMobi)
 * Shaik Idris (InMobi)
 * Venkatesh Seetharam (Hortonworks Inc.)
 * Sanjay Radia (Hortonworks Inc.)
 * Sharad Agarwal (InMobi)
 * Amareshwari SR (InMobi)
 * Samarth Gupta (InMobi)
 * Rishu Mehrothra (InMobi)

== Sponsors ==

=== Champion ===
 * Arun C Murthy (acmurthy at apache dot org)

=== Nominated Mentors ===
 * Alan Gates (gates AT apache DOT org)
 * Chris Douglas (cdouglas AT apache DOT org)
 * Devaraj  Das (ddas AT apache DOT org)
 * Owen O’Malley (omalley AT apache DOT org)

=== Sponsoring Entity ===
Incubator PMC

-- 
_____________________________________________________________
The information contained in this communication is intended solely for the 
use of the individual or entity to whom it is addressed and others 
authorized to receive it. It may contain confidential or legally privileged 
information. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified 
that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action in reliance 
on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be 
unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify 
us immediately by responding to this email and then delete it from your 
system. The firm is neither liable for the proper and complete transmission 
of the information contained in this communication nor for any delay in its 
receipt.

Reply via email to