Podling Shark Tank

### Overview At ApacheCon, the 'Podling Shark Tank' session offered an interactive platform for four Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubating projects ('podlings') to pitch their technology, community progress, and maturity. A panel of experienced Apache judges—Sally Khudairi (VP Marketing and Publicity at ASF), Jim Jagielski, and Justin Mclean—evaluated each project following a strict ten-minute pitch and five-minute Q&A format. The featured podlings included Apache Mynewt, Apache Edgent (formerly Quarks), Apache OpenWhisk, and Apache Traffic Control.

### Key Topics - **Apache Mynewt:** An open-source, permissive-licensed real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for 32-bit microcontrollers that cannot run Linux, including wearable and industrial IoT devices. It features the Newt package and build tool, the Newt Manager device management protocol (with Go and JavaScript implementations), and network stacks covering BLE (4.2 and 5), LoRa, 802.15.4 mesh, and IPv4/IPv6. - **Apache Edgent:** A streaming analytics framework executing directly at the edge on JVM-capable devices (like Android phones and Raspberry Pis). The project focuses on data reduction and latency reduction over constrained 3G/4G networks, processing sensor telemetry before transmission to backends. - **Apache OpenWhisk:** A serverless, multi-tenant Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform designed to execute event-driven functions (supporting Node.js, Python, Go, and Java) concurrently and efficiently inside VMs and Docker containers, minimizing idle energy consumption. - **Apache Traffic Control:** An open-source content delivery network (CDN) control plane originating from Comcast. Used in conjunction with caching proxies such as Apache Traffic Server, it provides analytics, configuration management, health protocols, and content routing.

### Technical Details & Security - **Mynewt:** Incorporates secure bootloader capabilities to authenticate and verify firmware images before boot. Communication security includes DTLS, TLS, and mandatory Bluetooth security manager profiles. Development incorporates automated vulnerability checks and Coverity code scans. - **Edgent:** Employs modular JAR runtimes to avoid extraneous dependencies (such as MQTT or Kafka connectors when not required). It addresses scenarios like transmitting camera frames only when facial detection triggers or microphone audio when decibel thresholds are crossed. - **OpenWhisk:** Relies on Docker containers, Kafka, and Scala/Akka to pack and manage multiple concurrent micro-actions into VMs securely and in a sandboxed manner. - **Traffic Control:** Comprises roughly 200,000 lines across Go, Java, and Perl, backed by 22,000 lines of reStructuredText (RST) documentation, managing large-scale video and content distribution.

### Takeaways & Community Challenges The panel consistently emphasized the Apache Way: technical functionality alone does not ensure graduation. Key governance challenges discussed across the podlings included: - Diversifying committer bases away from single-employer dominance (e.g., Edgent with 7 of 8 committers from IBM; OpenWhisk heavily reliant on IBM and Adobe). - Transitioning active users into code and documentation contributors. - Establishing release cadence and understanding ASF governance, licensing reviews, and vendor-neutral community management.