Apache Iggy, a message streaming platform written in Rust, officially graduated to Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Top-Level Project (TLP) status on August 19, 2026, following a unanimous vote from the Apache Incubator.
The project began in March 2023 as a personal experiment by Piotr Gankiewicz to learn Rust and explore message streaming internals. Despite an already crowded market with tools like Apache Kafka, the project evolved from a planned simple append-only log server into a persistent streaming platform built on a thread-per-core design with io_uring for disk/network I/O and single-digit millisecond P99+ latencies.
According to the announcement, the turning point came when external contributors began participating. What started as a solo side project transformed into a community-driven effort when developers outside the original creator started submitting pull requests, reporting issues, and engaging in technical discussions.
As the community grew, the project’s maintainers sought to ensure long-term sustainability independent of any single individual or company. In early 2025, they proposed Apache Iggy to the Apache Incubator, and LaserData Inc. transferred ownership of the source code to the ASF through the Software Grant process. This transition required the project to adopt Apache’s community governance model, operating through public discussions, votes, and consensus-based decision-making.
During its roughly 18-month incubation period, Iggy accumulated more than 4,500 GitHub stars, more than 120 contributors, nearly 3,000 pull requests, over 700 Discord community members, and more than 500,000 cumulative downloads. Kranti Parisa was appointed Chair of the Apache Iggy Project Management Committee upon graduation.
According to the project, the graduation marks the beginning of Iggy’s next chapter rather than a finish line. The roadmap includes releasing clustering capabilities based on Viewstamped Replication Revisited (VSR), completing a Kafka protocol gateway, exploring multi-leader replication per partition, tiered storage, and continuing to optimize performance through modern hardware and operating systems.
Key facts
- Apache Iggy graduated to top-level project status on August 19, 2026, after unanimous Apache Incubator approval
- The project began as a solo learning experiment in March 2023 and spent approximately 18 months in incubation
- During incubation, Iggy accumulated 4,500+ GitHub stars, 120+ contributors, nearly 3,000 pull requests, and 500K+ downloads
- Planned features include VSR-based clustering, Kafka protocol gateway, multi-leader replication, and tiered storage capabilities
- The project transitioned to Apache community governance model in early 2025 when LaserData Inc. transferred source code ownership to the ASF