PMC CHAIRDmitriy Pavlov
Apache Ignite Story
2014
Ignite is contributed to ASF
GridGain donates the core of its in-memory computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation under the name of "Apache Ignite". The project enters the Apache Incubator. The first members form its community.
2015
Ignite graduates from the incubator
In less than a year Ignite successfully graduates from the ASF incubator and became a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation.
2017
Ignite introduces Native Persistence and becomes a Top-5 Project
In 2017, two notable events happened.
First, with the donation of the Ignite native persistence to the project's codebase, a new chapter in the Ignite story begins. Since then, many will be using Ignite as a distributed database that scales across memory and disk with no compromises.
Second, this is the year when Ignite is ranked as a top-5 project of the ASF in various categories for the first time. A trend that will continue in the years to come.
2020
Ignite becomes (officially)
a distributed database
3 years after the initial release of the Ignite native persistence, the community and application developers carried on improving and adopting this capability for mission-critical production workloads.
Finally, after seeing the rapid adoption of Ignite as a database by application developers, the community repositions Ignite as a "distributed database for high-performance computing with in-memory speed".
2025
Ignite 3 is released
After years of development, Apache Ignite 3.0 was released in January 2025, representing a significant architectural evolution. The new version introduces a database-first design with SQL as the primary interface, schema-driven data colocation, Raft-based consensus for strong consistency, and MVCC for non-blocking reads.
Ignite 3.1 followed in October 2025 with additional enhancements. The community continues to innovate, building a cutting-edge distributed database for high-velocity data workloads.
