Ballista donation announcement
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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Ballista: A Distributed Scheduler for Apache Arrow"
+description: "We are excited to announce that Ballista has been donated to the Apache Arrow project. Ballista is a distributed scheduler for the Rust implementation of Apache Arrow."
+date: "2021-04-12 00:00:00 -0600"
+author: agrove
+categories: [application]
+---
+<!--
+{% comment %}
+Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
+contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
+this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
+The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0
+(the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
+the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
+
+http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+limitations under the License.
+{% endcomment %}
+-->
+
+We are excited to announce that [Ballista](https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/master/rust/ballista) has been donated
+to the Apache Arrow project.
+
+Ballista is a distributed compute platform primarily implemented in Rust, and powered by Apache Arrow. It is built
+on an architecture that allows other programming languages (such as Python, C++, and Java) to be supported as
+first-class citizens without paying a penalty for serialization costs.
+
+The foundational technologies in Ballista are:
+
+- [Apache Arrow](https://arrow.apache.org/) memory model and compute kernels for efficient processing of data.
+- [Apache Arrow Flight Protocol](https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2019/10/13/introducing-arrow-flight/) for efficient
+ data transfer between processes.
+- [Google Protocol Buffers](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) for serializing query plans.
+- [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) for packaging up executors along with user-defined code.
+
+Ballista can be deployed as a standalone cluster and also supports [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/). In either
+case, the scheduler can be configured to use [etcd](https://etcd.io/) as a backing store to (eventually) provide
+redundancy in the case of a scheduler failing.
+
+## Status
+
+The Ballista project is at an early stage of development. However, it is capable of running complex analytics queries
+in a distributed cluster with reasonable performance.
+
+The following chart shows the current performance of Ballista for a number of TPC-H queries at scale factor 100. The
+current performance at this scale is similar to Apache Spark, and better in some cases. More work is now needed to
+make Ballista scale with larger data sets.
+
+
+
+One of the benefits of Ballista being part of the Arrow codebase is that there is now an opportunity to push parts of
+the scheduler down to DataFusion so that is possible to seamlessly scale across cores in DataFusion, and across nodes
+in Ballista, using the same unified query scheduler.
+
+## Contributors Welcome!
+
+If you are excited about being able to use Rust for distributed compute and ETL and would like to contribute to this
+work then there are many ways to get involved. The simplest way to get started is to try out Ballista against your own
+datasets and file bug reports for any issues that you find. You could also check out the current
+[list of issues](https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20ARROW%20AND%20component%20%3D%20%22Rust%20-%20Ballista%22) and have a go at fixing one.
+
+The [Arrow Rust Community](https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/rust/README.md#arrow-rust-community)
+section of the Rust README provides information on other ways to interact with the Ballista contributors and
+maintainers.
+
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