The Apache Software Foundation swelled its ranks this morning with the addition of the open-source Brooklyn orchestration framework, which has officially become a top-level project after 18 months in incubation. The graduation is the culmination of a much longer journey that started in 2011 at a little-known U.K.-based automation provider called Cloudsoft Corporation Ltd. that sought a way to tame the growing complexity of enterprise infrastructure.

Brooklyn tackles the challenge with a high-level configuration mechanism that enables administrators to describe how they wish to set up their environments in so-called blueprints that are automatically applied across the entire application stack down to the servers below. Each individual component can then be assigned policies to dictate its behavior in different circumstances. A service using the framework can thus provision additional hardware during usage spikes or activate standby machines after a failure without any manual intervention, improving incident reaction times and reducing management overhead in one stroke.

The entire feature set is accessible through a graphical interface that doubles as a monitoring console for tracking key operational metrics such as latency and performance. In that sense, Brooklyn is quite similar to Google Inc.’s likewise open-source Kubernetes orchestration engine, with the notable difference that it’s compatible not only with containers but also virtual machines and practically any other component found in an application stack. This interoperability enables the framework to serve the central nervous system for an organization’s entire infrastructure, a value proposition that has already attracted the attention of several big industry names.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) uses Brooklyn to help handle the billions of financial transactions that are processed through its platform every year, while IBM Corp. is harnessing the system to migrate workloads from Amazon Web Services to its competing public cloud. The framework’s graduation to a top-level project represents a major vote of confidence from the Apache Software Foundation that could help broaden its appeal to a much wider audience, a process that Cloudsoft hopes to hurry along with an ambitious development roadmap that is set to see the first stable release launched in the first half of next year.

The company has much more to gain from witnessing the project succeed than merely boosting its reputation in the open-source ecosystem. The broader the interest in Brooklyn, the more potential customers will start taking note of its commercial version, which complements the core capabilities of the framework with value-added features meant to simplify everyday use.

Image via ASF