ApacheCon: Core Europe 2015

In April 2015, Apache Geode (incubating) was born from Pivotal’s GemFire, the distributed in-memory database. However, the donation of over 1M LOC was just the beginning of the journey. In this talk we discuss how the GemFire engineering team has adapted their development infrastructure, processes, and culture to embrace the “Apache Way". We present lessons learned and best practices for new and incubating open source projects in areas of initial code submission, IP clearance, governance policies, code review, and community building. We discuss the challenges the team faced and how we changed internal communication and software design processes to a community-driven model. In particular, we highlight effective strategies for growing a project community and embracing new members. Finally, we show how changing to the open source model has increased both productivity and quality.