// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Apache Iggy, a message streaming platform in Rust, graduates to an Apache TLP
We've got some amazing news to share: as of August 19th, 2026, Apache Iggy has officially graduated after a unanimously positive vote from the Apache Incubator and is now an Apache Software Foundation Top-Level Project (TLP). This is a special milestone for us.
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 about a year and a half.
It all began in March 2023 out of Piotr Gankiewicz’s pure 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 a thread-per-core design with io_uring for 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 a community.
Contributors came and went. Some submitted a single PR. Others stayed and eventually became committers and members of the project. Creating our Discord community 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 our 2023 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.