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The TARS Foundation: The Formation of a Microservices Ecosystem Introduction

During the 1960s and 1970’s, software developers typically used monolithic architectures on mainframes and minicomputers for software development, and no single application was able to satisfy the needs of most end-users. Vertical industries used software with a smaller code footprint with simpler interfaces to other applications, and scalability was not a priority at the time.

With the rise and development of the Internet, developers gradually separated the service layer from these monolithic architectures, followed by RPC and then Client/Server.

But existing architectures were unable to keep up with the needs of larger enterprises and exploding data traffic. Beginning in the middle of the 1990s, distributed architectures began to rise in popularity, with service-oriented architectures (known as SOA) becoming increasingly dominant.

In the mid-2000s, microservices began to appear, and a set of popular frameworks based on microservice architectures were developed, with TARS appearing in 2008. After being used at scale and enhanced for 10 years, TARS became a Linux Foundation project in 2018.

Figure 1.  Interest in microservices has grown exponentially, as demonstrated by search trends on Google.

Introducing the TARS Foundation

Today, on March 10th, 2020, The Linux Foundation is excited to announce that the TARS project has transitioned into the TARS Foundation. The TARS Foundation is an open source microservice foundation to support the rapid growth of contributions and membership for a community focused on building an open microservices platform.

A Neutral Home for Open Source Microservices Projects

The TARS Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that focuses on open source technology that helps businesses embrace microservices architecture as they innovate into new areas and scale their applications.

It will continue to support the TARS project by growing the community that has been operating under the Linux Foundation since 2018. The Linux Foundation offers a neutral home for infrastructure, open governance, and community engagement support, aiding open source microservices projects to empower any industry to turn ideas into applications at scale quickly.

The TARS Foundation is working on addressing the problems that may occur in using microservices, including reducing the difficulties of development and service governance. It seeks to solve multi-programming language interoperability, data transfer issues, consistency of data storage, and ensuring high performance while supporting massive requests.

The TARS Foundation wishes to accommodate a variety of bottom-up content to build a better microservice ecosystem. It will include but will not be limited to, infrastructure, storage, development framework, service governance, DevOps, and applications based on any programming languages.

It Begins With a Mature Microservice Framework

The modern enterprise is in need of a better microservices platform for their modern applications to support development through DevOps best practices, comprehensive service governance, high-performance data transfer, storage scalability with massive data requests, and built-in cross-language interoperability (e.g., Golang, Java, C++, PHP, Node.js).

In support of these growing requirements, the TARS project provides a mature, high-performance RPC framework that supports multiple programming languages developed by Tencent (0700.HK). Since the initial open source contribution by Tencent, many other organizations have made significant contributions to extending the platform’s features and value.

Figure 2. The TARS Project Microservice Ecosystem.

TARS can quickly build systems and automatically generate code, taking into account ease of use and high performance. At the same time, TARS supports multiple programming languages, including C++, Golang, Java, Node.js, PHP, and Python. TARS can help developers and enterprises to quickly build their own stable and reliable distributed applications in a microservices manner, in order to focus on business logic to effectively improve operational efficiency.

The advantages of multi-language support, agile research and development, high availability, and efficient operation make TARS an enterprise-grade product out of the box. TARS has been used and refined in Tencent for the past ten years and has been widely used in Tencent’s QQ and WeChat social network, financial services, edge computing, automotive, video, online games, maps, application market and security, and other hundreds of core businesses. The scale of microservices has reached over one million nodes, perfecting the practice of the industry-standard DevOps philosophy and Tencent’s mass service approach.

Why Should Projects Choose The TARS Foundation?

Joining the TARS Foundation will provide member organizations and projects with the following benefits:

Community Engagement

• The TARS Foundation will host a constellation of open source projects. Members of the TARS Foundation will leverage many programs to engage with project ecosystems and share their ideas and use cases.

Thought Leadership

• Members of the TARS Foundation will be able to network and help shape the evolving microservices ecosystem.

Marketing Amplification and Brand Awareness

• Members can broaden their project’s reach and awareness in the community with TARS Foundation marketing programs.

As the TARS Foundation has been created to develop and foster the open microservices ecosystem, it will establish different functional mailing lists to support its user communities.

The TARS Foundation will also establish a series of mechanisms for the incubation and development of new projects. After a project has agreed to join the Foundation, the appropriate incubation and maturation route will be tailored according to the project circumstances.

After meeting all incubation requirements, the TARS Foundation will announce the project’s graduation. In addition to providing a technical oversight committee and a user community, the governing board will look after these projects by reviewing each project’s unique situation, providing strategic decisions, and assisting with their overall development.

Partner Commitments to the TARS Foundation

The TARS Foundation aims to empower any industry vertical to realize their ideas with their implementation of microservices. To date, TARS has worked with many industries, including fintech, e-sports, edge computing, online video, e-commerce, and education, among others.

As a result of over a decade of industry leadership in developing open microservices projects, many companies from different industries, such as ARM, Tencent, AfterShip, Ampere, API7, Kong, and Zenlayer, have committed to and have joined The TARS Foundation as members and partners.

Tencent

TARS has been developed, hardened, and enhanced within Tencent for more than ten years. It is widely used in Tencent’s QQ and WeChat social, video, e-Sports, maps, application market and security, and other hundreds of core businesses. The scale of microservices has reached over one million nodes, perfecting the practice of the industry-standard DevOps philosophy and Tencent’s mass service approach.

Arm

ARM is the world’s leading semiconductor intellectual property (IP) provider. Arm has been working with Tencent over the last year to undertake a complete port of TARS microservices to the Arm architecture. That porting effort is now complete and is available through the Akraino Blueprint ecosystem. The first two Arm deployments within Tencent are AR/VR and autonomous vehicle use cases for internal Tencent use.

“We want to take the most active role in microservices to be ubiquitous, so we choose to be a premier member.”

AfterShip

AfterShip is a Hong Kong startup company offering automated shipment tracking using a SaaS model and supports over 400 shipping services worldwide.

 “We believe microservices will be a new concept for our products, and the TARS Foundation can empower its usage.”

Ampere

Ampere focuses on cloud-native hardware. As such, it needs to ensure that any software used on that hardware runs exceedingly well to meet the demands of their customers’ expectations.

“Microservices have become very popular for several years, so we think cooperation with the TARS Foundation and focusing on microservices will allow us to achieve our vision.”

API7

API7’s open-source project, APISIX, which is based on Nginx and etcd, is a cloud-native microservices API gateway that aims to deliver the ultimate performance, security, open source, and scalable platform for all APIs and microservices. Compared with traditional API gateways, APISIX has dynamic routing and plug-in hot loading, which is especially suitable for API management under a microservices-based system.

Kong

Kong is the world’s most popular open source microservice API gateway. Kong is used to secure, manage, and orchestrate microservice APIs.

“We look forward to collaborating with the TARS Foundation members to drive microservices adoption and innovation across businesses of all industries.”

Zenlayer

Zenlayer is an edge cloud services provider that enables businesses to improve digital user experiences quickly and globally, particularly in emerging markets.

“Integration of microservices with edge computing is now widespread. We look forward to doing more research on that and with the TARS Foundation.”

Conclusion

The TARS Foundation can help make the microservices ecosystem more effective, building a more aligned community of contributors and supporters. As more technology-first companies deploy microservices in production, we expect the trend to extend to traditional industries that are transforming. We hope that more people and companies will participate in the TARS Foundation and welcome everyone to contribute to a better and more open microservice ecosystem.

“The TARS Foundation will accelerate innovation for the microservices ecosystem through an open governance model that allows for rapid and high-quality contributions and collaboration. The Linux Foundation is very happy to support this work and enable its growth.” — Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation

The post The TARS Foundation: The Formation of a Microservices Ecosystem appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

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Developers can help extend Project OWL’s reach by leveraging new open source technology to build mesh network nodes for emergency communications networks globally 

Lake Tahoe, Calif.,  March 10, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced Project OWL’s IoT device firmware effort will be hosted at the Foundation and is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks. Project OWL, the winner of Call for Code 2018, is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response. The Linux Foundation’s open governance model will enable a global network of developers to accelerate the development of the mesh networks, which could help save lives following a natural disaster.

Project OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics) has developed mesh network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices called “DuckLinks” that can be deployed or activated in disaster areas to quickly reestablish connectivity and improve communication between first responders and civilians in need. A central portal connects to solar- and battery-powered water resistant ‘DuckLinks’ that are placed in the field to generate a Local Area Network (LAN) using a Wi-Fi captive portal powered by low frequency Long-range Radio (LoRa) connectivity. These DuckLinks provide an emergency network to all mobile devices in their perimeter, instructing people how to connect to an emergency response portal. First responders can also use analytics and data sources to build a dashboard and formulate an action plan, such as coordinating resources, learning about weather patterns, and communicating with civilians who would otherwise be cut off.

Project OWL envisions the nodes creating large-scale communications networks in the wake of natural disasters. The open source release of OWL’s firmware can quickly turn a cheap wireless device into a DuckLink, a mesh network node capable of connecting to any other Ducks physically around it. This release marks a significant milestone putting the ClusterDuck Protocol into the hands of global developers. This is a starting point to even larger efforts in communities around the world to provide communications where infrastructure is degraded or nonexistent.

“Becoming part of The Linux Foundation community is a huge boost in accelerating our goal to better prepare communities and mitigate impact when hurricanes, floods or earthquakes strike. We want to challenge developers to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks leveraging our newly open-sourced IoT firmware,” said Bryan Knouse, Co-Founder of Project OWL.

“When developing technologies that can have a direct impact on human life, it’s more important than ever to bring the largest possible global community of developers together working with an open governance model,” said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at The Linux Foundation. “Project OWL’s technology solution is providing better information and analytics and enabling quicker distribution of resources and care where and when it’s needed most. We’re proud to support such a worthy cause.”

“As a developer, I am excited Project OWL’s firmware is open source and not just a hardware-software product. OWL has become a global movement that anyone from anywhere on the planet can join, contribute and address global issues,” said Vikas Singh, India-based open source developer.

In 2018, Project OWL emerged as the global winner in the inaugural Call for Code Global Challenge, competing with more than 100,000 participants from 156 nations. The Call for Code Global Challenge encourages and fosters the creation of practical applications built on open source software. The goal is to employ technology in new ways that can make an immediate and lasting humanitarian impact in communities around the world. Since winning in 2018, Project Owl has been fortified, tested, and deployed through IBM Code and Response, a $25 million, four-year deployment initiative to put open source technologies in the communities where they are needed most.

“Project OWL was our first Call for Code winner that went through the Code and Response incubation process, and we’re excited to see this solution grow closer to reality,” said Daniel Krook, IBM Chief Technology Officer for Call for Code and Code and Response. “We were impressed with their combination of a complete software and hardware open source solution, utilizing an AI-powered disaster coordination platform paired with a robust communication network to reach people when connections are down. IBM is committed to using the power of our network and technical know-how to alleviate suffering from climate change and natural disasters, and we’re thrilled to have the support of The Linux Foundation as we deploy the project globally.”

In March 2019, Project OWL and IBM took on a large-scale pilot trip to Puerto Rico, deploying over 63 ducks each covering two square miles. This was followed by two additional pilots in the west and southeast of the island, engaging with local students, businesses, government representatives, and first responders. OWL currently has 30 permanent, solar-powered devices deployed across Puerto Rico in areas that are vulnerable to earthquakes, flooding, fire or other weather conditions.

Resources:

Code and Response with The Linux Foundation: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/code-and-response/

Contribute on GitHub: https://github.com/Code-and-Response/ClusterDuck-Protocol

Learn more about the ClusterDuck Protocol: http://clusterduckprotocol.org/

 

About Call for Code

Developers have revolutionized the way people live and interact with virtually everyone and everything. Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That’s why David Clark Cause created and launched Call for Code in 2018 alongside Founding Partner IBM. This five-year, $30 million global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their skills and mastery of the latest technologies, and to create new ones, to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world with their code. Call for Code global winning solutions, among others, are further developed and deployed via the IBM Code and Response initiative.

About The Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. The Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Media Contacts

Beth Handoll

ReTHINKitMedia

beth@rethinkitmedia.com

+1 415 535 8658

The post The Linux Foundation Open Sources Hardware of Disaster Relief Project that Won First Call for Code Global Challenge Led by IBM appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

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