[REPORT] Pulsar March 2020

[Matteo Merli <mm...@apache.org>]

## Description:

Pulsar is a highly scalable, low latency messaging platform running on
commodity hardware. It provides simple pub-sub semantics over topics,
guaranteed at-least-once delivery of messages, automatic cursor management for
subscribers, and cross-datacenter replication.

## Issues:
 - There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.

## Project Activity:
  - The project has released 2.5.0 in December that included Highlights
    include:
     * [PIP-41] Introduce Protocol Handler API
* [PIP-45] Pluggable metadata interface
* [PIP-44] Separate schema compatibility checker for producer and consumer
* [PIP-43] Producer send messages with different schema
* [PIP-51] Introduce sticky consumer
* [PIP-38] Support batch receive in java client.
* [PIP-52] Add support of dispatch throttling relative to publish-rate
* Upgraded to ZooKeeper 3.5
* Upgraded to BookKeeper 4.10.0
* HDFS offloader for Pulsar tiered storage
  - Work is underway for next release 2.6.0
  - Pulsar NodeJS client library 1.1.0 was released on Feb 18th.

  - Several improvement proposals have been submitted:
     * PIP 59: gPRC Protocol Handler
     * PIP 58: Support Consumers Set Custom Retry Delay
     * PIP 57: Improve Broker's Zookeeper Session Timeout Handling
     * PIP 56: Python3 Migration
     * PIP 55: Refresh Authentication Credentials
     * PIP 54: Support acknowledgement at batch index level
     * PIP 53: Contribute DotPulsar to Apache Pulsar
     * PIP 52: Message dispatch throttling relative to publish rate

  - Several talk on Pulsar were presented at conferences and meetups, in US,
    Europe and China, both by Pulsar committer/PMC members as well as other
    members of the community. Non-exaustive list:
     * A Pulsar meetup was held on Jan 15 in Toronto. Cory Darby gave a talk
       about
       "RIP Apache Kafka, long live Apache Pulsar" and Tamer A shared about
       "Pulsar in Action, getting your hands dirty with Pulsar".
     * Apache IoTDB X Apache Pulsar meetup was held on Jan 4 in Beijing. Jia
       Zhai from StreamNative shared about "Apache Pulsar: from messaging
       system to event streaming platform". Besides, Guangning E from
       StreamNative gave a talk about
       "How to connect Apache Pulsar to IoTDB with Pulsar IO".
     * Pulsar Summit SF was initially scheduled for Apr 28th though due to
       current sitation it has been postponed to a TBD date after summer.

  - Work is ongoing for next release (2.6.0) and for to reach the first
    release for the native Go client library.

## Community Health:
  - There is healthy grow in the community, several users are starting to
    become contributors to the project and engaging more and more with
    the community.

## Membership Data:
  - There are currently 30 committers and 24 PMC members in this project.
  - The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 5:4.

  - Community changes, past quarter:
   * No new PMC members. Last addition was Penghui Li on 2019-09-16.
   * No new committers. Last addition was Liu Yu on 2019-11-28.

## Releases:

  - 2.5.0 was released on Dec. 6th 2019
  - Pulsar-client-node 1.1.0 was released on Feb. 18th 2020

## Mailing list activity:

 - Activity on the mailing lists remains high with a mixture of new users,
   contributors, and deeper more experienced users and contributors sparking
   discussion and questions and filing bugs or new features.

 - users@pulsar.apache.org:
    - 140 subscribers (+10 from Dec 2019) - 137 emails sent to list in
last 3 months

 - dev@pulsar.apache.org:
    - 174 subscribers (+21 from Dec 2019) - 425 emails sent to list in
last 3 months

## Slack activity:
  * 1673 Members (1311 in Dec 2019)
  * 234 Active weekly users (160 in Dec 2019)

## GitHub activity:

 - 438 PRs from 88 contributors (+11) were merged in the last 3 months
 - 278 Issues were created and 165 closed in the last 3 months
 - 5218 Stars (up from 4608 in Dec 2019)



--
Matteo Merli
<mm...@apache.org>