This report will present the works and achievements made by the TARS Foundation and community members over the past year. Comments and feedback are welcome at tars@tarscloud.org

Who We Are

Established on March 10th, 2020, the TARS Foundation is an open source microservice foundation under the Linux Foundation umbrella to support the rapid growth of contributions and membership for a community focused on building an open microservices ecosystem.

We are working on addressing the problems that may occur in using microservices, including reducing the difficulties of development and service governance. It seeks to solve multi-programming language interoperability, data transfer issues, consistency of data storage, and ensuring high performance while supporting massive requests.

Mission

The TARS Foundation aims to bring together companies and individual contributors to build a standard microservices ecosystem that can help companies quickly turn ideas into applications at scale, whether in the cloud or on-premise.

TARS Foundation Members

The TARS Foundation was launched with 7 founding members. They are Tencent, Arm, Aftership, Ampere, API7, Kong, and Zenlayer.

End Users

The TARS End User Community is a special platform for end user companies to network and to share case studies and about themselves to a broader audience. Currently, TARS End Users include UpChina, China Literature, Longtu Game, Century Kunpeng, TAL Education, Qianniaohudong (千鸟互动), and Huya.

The TARS Foundation welcomes more companies to join the End User Community. If you like more information about the end usersor you are interested in joining, please fill this form.

Timeline

This is a timeline that lists all the major events and milestones of the TARS Foundation.

Landscape

Similar to the CNCF Interactive Landscape that illustrates different types of tools for building a Cloud-Native architecture, the TARS Landscape is the ideal microservices ecosystem that the TARS Foundation is working to achieve with the open source community.

TARS Landscape can be accessed at https://landscape.tarscloud.org

In order to build a better microservices ecosystem, the TARS Foundation envisions accepting more projects in areas including but not limited to infrastructure, communication, storage, development framework, service governance, DevOps toolchain, and applications based on different programming languages. Further, we hope to create the next generation of microservices and drive innovations in telecommunications, edge computing, gaming, online video, fintech, and more.

TARS Project Highlights

The TARS Greenhouse includes the projects that are currently available in the TARS microservices ecosystem. Here we present the following projects that were open sourced during 2020.

• K8STARS
• TarsGateway
• TarsBenmark
• TarsJMeter

K8STARS is a Kubernetes native TARS solution that combines the massive high-performance data processing and excellent service governance capabilities of TARS with the resource scheduling and container orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes. It supports smooth migration of original TARS services to kubernetes and other container platforms.

Detail
https://github.com/TarsCloud/K8STARS

TarsGateway is a set of general API gateway developed based on the TARS framework. The request is http protocol, and the backend supports tars-tup&tars-tars protocol, tars-json protocol, and http protocol simultaneously. In addition to protocol forwarding, it also supports flow control, black and white lists and other functions.

Detail
https://github.com/TarsCloud/TarsGateway

TarsBenchmark is a non-code benchmark tool specially tailored for TARS service. It is easy to use, with high performance, scalability, support for dynamic random, and real-time data feedback.

Detail:
https://github.com/TarsCloud/TarsBenchmark

TarsJMeter is a JMeter test plug-in customized for high-performance TARS protocol. It is easy to use, supports distribution and complex use case scenarios. Its test data can be monitored as well.

Detail:
https://github.com/TarsCloud/TarsJMeter

Community Highlights

Training Resources

Free edX Training Course

Back in September 2020, we collaborated with LF Training to release our first TARS MOOC course that gives an introduction to TARS microservices and how to work with the TARS Framework.

• “The course explains how to efficiently develop microservices programs using different programming languages and quickly deploy the corresponding services into applications. It also delves into the powerful functionalities of TARS and the components that make up the TARS ecosystem.” - LF Training
• Available at no charge: https://www.edx.org/course/building-microservice-platforms-with-tars
• We have more than 1,000 students enrolled since release in September

The TARS Foundation will continue to work with LF Training and produce more training courses on TARS. Please stay tuned!

Ebooks

Over the past year, we have released 3 ebooks related to TARS and the open source community. Their brief summaries are as follows.

Explore Your Microservices

Overview: Ever since the microservice concept was first introduced in 2005, this style of architecture has become more popular and prevalent. This e-book will explain the development history of microservices, and explore microservices with you using the TARS development framework as an example.

Five Reasons to Migrate to TARS

Overview: Migrating to microservices is not an easy project and it requires careful planning. Based on the user stories of TARS, we’ve created this e-book to illustrate how TARS can help you overcome five common microservices challenges.

Common Open Source Practices in Developing Cloud-Native Applications

Overview: With the advent of digital transformation, Cloud-Native applications have become a critical driving force for business innovation. In this eBook, you will find information about popular open source technologies used in different areas of Cloud-Native applications, such as containers, container orchestration, and microservices.

If you are interested in downloading the ebooks, subscribe to the TARS Foundation Information mailing list and the ebooks will be sent to your inbox.

TARS Certification

The TARS Foundation is working to provide credential certification for the qualified outstanding enterprise and personal contributors. Currently, we have Certified Service Provider and Certified TARS Partner available for companies. Individual certifications are currently being developed. If you are interested in learning more about certification, find out more here.

TARS University Tour

Co-sponsored by Tencent, the TARS University Tour Program had more than 250 college students in North America participate in a competition to develop microservice programs. During this event, Jimmy Yu, TarsJava maintainer and ambassador, mentored the students with his technical expertise and gave lectures. Students who successfully completed the program received a Certificate of Honor issued by the TARS Foundation.

Community Events

Cloud Native + Open Source Virtual Summit China 2020

This three-day virtual event hosted by the CNCF gathered leading technologists of China’s active open source and cloud native communities to further the advancement of cloud native computing. The TARS Foundation attended the event as a partner and platinum sponsor, and we had the opportunity to inform and educate the cloud native community about TARS microservices ecosystem in the three-day sessions.

Specifically, we had the honor to have Jim Zemlin, the executive director from the Linux Foundation, give an opening speech to kick off the TARS sessions.

Mark Shan, Chair of the TARS Foundation Governing Board, presented the next generation microservices ecosystem provided by TARS

A roundtable discussion was hosted by Mark Shan with guests: Dexian Chen (Tencent Health), Yanbo Ma (China Literature), and Demao Mao (Huya Live)

Representatives from our member companies, ARM and Ampere, were also invited to present their uses of TARS in different scenarios (see below).

Tina Tsou, Arm Enterprise Architect

Fei fei, Ampere Semiconductor Principal Engineer

Overall, the TARS Foundation was able to engage with the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors - including the world’s largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as innovative startups. The open source summit had more than 10,000 attendees and the views of the event recordings went beyond 120,000.

TARS Microservices Day

The TARS Foundation participated in the Kubernetes, Hyperledger, TARS Microservices Open Source Technology Forum co-sponsored by LF Open Source Software University on September 30, 2020. TARS Microservices Day shared with developers about TARS use cases and applications. The event had 100+ attendees and social media coverage reached 10,000.

TARS Meetup (Wuhan, China)

This is the first in-person TARS meetup hosted by the TARS Foundation in Wuhan. In this event, TARS Foundation Ambassador Ruan Shudong shared the latest version of the TARS framework. In addition, technical lecturers from Graphite Document, Douyu, and Jiyi Technology were invited to share the related technologies of microservices with the participants.

TARS Meetup (Delhi, India)

The TARS Foundation hosted the first TARS India Community online meetup took place on Saturday, Jan 9th for about 3 hours with 4 unique sessions. For this meetup, we partnered with Parserlabs to invite speakers from the U.S. and India to talk about TARS Use Cases, Best Fitment of Micro-services in IoT Ecosystem, and Cloud-Native Next-Generation Monitoring. Tina Tsou, Enterprise Architect from ARM and TARS Outreach Committee member, shared about TARS use cases and application scenarios in edge computing, AI, and Fintech.

Looking Forward to 2021

The TARS Foundation is committed to delivering programs to support the community. If you’re interested in getting involved here are a few ways:

• Become a member of the TARS Foundation.
• Apply to join the TARS End User Community.
• Call for projects! We welcome open source projects to join us and incubate.
• Stay updated with TARS Foundation’s exciting content. Sign-up for the mailing list.
• Star our GitHub Repository as the first step to join the TARS Community!

Stay tuned for news about new TARS Foundation events later this year.