What started more than three years ago as a small experiment to learn Rust and explore the internals of message streaming has grown into an independent Apache project with contributors and users from around the world. And somehow, the journey from joining the Apache Incubator to becoming a TLP took only abouta year and a half.
It all began in March 2023 out ofPiotr Gankiewicz’spure curiosity. There was no corporate mandate or missing tool driving it – just an engineering desire to learn messaging internals and finally pick up Rust for real. Sure, the market was already flooded with message streaming tools like Apache Kafka, but that didn’t matter. Engineers still build new database engines all the time, driven by an obsession with latency, performance, efficiency and operational simplicity – and a simple “let’s just build what we desire” attitude. Besides, the name Iggy – short for Italian Greyhound, small but unmatched in speed – deserved a project of its own.
The initial plan was simple: build a basic append-only log server, get comfortable with Rust, and call it a day. But it didn’t stay simple. Performance is a deep rabbit hole – developers quickly find themselves constantly optimizing, modularizing, and chasing efficiency. Fast-forward to today, and Iggy is a persistent streaming platform built on athread-per-coredesign withio_uringfor disk/network I/O,VSR(Viewstamped Replication Revisited) for consensus, and single-digit millisecond P99+ latencies.
But technology is only part of the story.The bigger change happened when other people started contributing.
The moment someone you’ve never met spends their own time submitting a pull request, reporting an issue, improving documentation, testing something or simply participating in a technical discussion, a personal experiment starts becoming something else. It becomes acommunity.
Contributors came and went. Some submitted a single PR. Others stayed and eventually became committers and members of the project. Creating ourDiscordcommunity made it easier for people to ask questions, propose ideas and interact with developers. GitHub remained the place where technical decisions and project work could happen openly and remain searchable.
As described in our2023 post about building message streaming in Rust, the project had already transformed from a “solo side project to complete in three weeks” into something much bigger.
As the community grew, we faced a more important question:How do we make sure Iggy remains truly open source for the long term?
We wanted contributors and users to know that the project’s future wouldn’t depend on a single individual or company, and that its license couldn’t suddenly change because someone’s commercial strategy changed. The Apache Software Foundation was a natural home.
In early 2025, weproposedApache Iggy to the Apache Incubator, and LaserData Inc. transferred ownership of the Iggy source code to the Apache Software Foundation through the ASF Software Grant process. That transition changed much more than the project’s name.
There was no longer an “owner” of Iggy making unilateral decisions. The project would operate through Apache’s community governance: public discussions, votes, releases, committers, PPMC members and consensus. Learning to operate this way was an important part of incubation.
Kranti Parisaled much of Iggy’s journey into the Apache Software Foundation, from helping drive the original Incubator proposal and onboarding process through the project’s graduation. With graduation, Kranti has been appointed Chair of the Apache Iggy Project Management Committee (Iggy PMC). The Chair is not the leader of an Apache project (the PMC collectively governs it), but serves as the project’s liaison with the ASF Board and helps ensure the health and governance of the project.