Transition sarama ownership

[dmariassy]

Shopify's Streaming team has decided to shift away from native Kafka libraries (such as sarama or ruby-kafka), and to favour bindings of librdkafka (e.g. confluent-kafka-go and rdkafka-ruby) instead. As a result we don't believe that Shopify is the best positioned to act as an effective steward of sarama in the long term. Therefore, we would like to begin the process of finding a new owner for this popular and widely adopted project.

In the coming days and weeks our team will reach out to the most active sarama contributors and some of its largest adopters to discuss options for a smooth transition of ownership. We also welcome volunteers' expression of interest in the comments below! Our goal is to execute this handover in a way that minimizes disruption for existing users, and ensures the level of continued support that the project deserves.

[ninadingole]

@dmariassy what was the reason for Shopify to move towards librdkafka and confluent-kafka-go? I know the confluent go library was not that performant as compared to sarama

[dmariassy]

Hi @ninadingole, the tl;dr is that we have a number of C-style languages that our platform team needs to support (Go, Ruby, Python, Rust), and so zeroing in on a C engine (librdkafka) provides us with economies of scale.

[napallday]

hi @dmariassy , may I know if there is any update on this one?

In my company Shopee, I have built an enhanced Kafka client library on top of Sarama, and ensuring the stability and continuity of Sarama is of utmost importance to us.

While our company may not have the resources to fully take over the project, I personally have a strong interest in contributing as an one of the individual maintainers. I have participated in the Sarama community, submitting several pull requests over the past year, and I'm committed to supporting and improving the project going forward.

[dmariassy]

Hi @napallday , I should be able to share more details on this soon but it looks like we're on track to secure the future of the project 🤞🏻

[dmariassy]

I'm happy to share that @dnwe has agreed to become the primary maintainer of sarama! 🎉 The project will be moved to IBM's github organization, and will become IBM/sarama. Due to organizational policies, Shopify can't directly transition the repo to IBM, instead we will need to follow a two-step process of

Shopify ➡️ dnwe ➡️ IBM

Please bear with us while we perform this migration, which hopefully won't take more than a week or two.

We are super grateful for Dominic's ongoing contributions to sarama, and for IBM's decision to adopt the project! We are confident that under their stewardship, sarama will be set up for continued succes!

[dmariassy]

https://github.com/IBM/sarama ✅

[lizthegrey]

Congrats @dnwe and thank you @IBM!