Discover China's Trailblazing Open‑Source Projects Shaping the Global Tech Landscape

Kylin

Kylin™ is the first Chinese project to become an Apache top‑level open‑source project. It is a distributed analytics engine that provides a SQL query interface and OLAP capabilities on Hadoop, capable of handling TB to PB‑scale analysis tasks with sub‑second query latency and high concurrency.

The core idea is pre‑computation (trading space for time) by building cubes of metric aggregates, allowing fast queries and high concurrency.

Official website : http://kylin.apache.org/

RocketMQ

Originally developed by Alibaba, RocketMQ was donated to Apache in 2016 and later graduated to a top‑level project in 2017. It provides a distributed messaging middleware used in e‑commerce, IoT, finance, and big‑data scenarios, and integrates with ecosystems such as Spark, Ignite, and Storm.

RocketMQ has gained global attention, with over 100 companies and research institutions using it, and the United States being its second largest access market.

Official website : http://rocketmq.apache.org/

Pulsar

Pulsar is a distributed publish/subscribe messaging platform designed for scalability, flexibility, and zero data loss. It separates the serving and storage layers, enabling easy cluster scaling, node replacement, and high read/write availability.

It leverages Apache BookKeeper for storage and is used by companies such as MercadoLibre, Oath, and Yahoo Japan.

Official website : http://pulsar.apache.org/

SkyWalking

SkyWalking is an application performance monitoring (APM) tool for microservices, cloud‑native, and containerized applications. Created in 2015 and graduated to an Apache top‑level project in 2019, it provides metrics monitoring, distributed tracing, service mesh telemetry, and visualization.

Official website : http://skywalking.apache.org/

Vue

Vue.js is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. It focuses on the view layer, offers an incremental adoption model, and integrates easily with other libraries or existing projects, while also supporting complex single‑page applications through single‑file components.

Official website : https://cn.vuejs.org/

Spring Cloud Alibaba

Spring Cloud Alibaba provides an implementation of the Spring Cloud microservice specifications for the Chinese ecosystem, offering a complete set of components, Chinese documentation, and localized services that accelerate microservice adoption and reduce operational complexity.

It is the only domestic open‑source project that graduated from the Spring Cloud Incubator.

Official website : https://github.com/alibaba/spring-cloud-alibaba

Harbor

Harbor is an enterprise‑grade Docker registry server developed by VMware’s China team. It offers RBAC, LDAP integration, auditing, a UI, self‑registration, and high availability, improving performance and security for container image distribution.

In 2018, CNCF accepted Harbor as a sandbox project, making it the first CNCF project originated in China.

Official website : https://goharbor.io/

TiKV

TiKV is a distributed transactional key‑value database built in Rust, inspired by Google Spanner and HBase. It provides strong consistency, horizontal scalability, and cloud‑native architecture, and integrates tightly with TiDB.

Geo‑replication using Raft and Placement Driver ensures data safety.

Horizontal scaling supports over 100 TB of data.

Supports external consistent distributed transactions similar to Spanner.

Provides a coprocessor framework for distributed computation.

Works seamlessly with TiDB to deliver a unified storage solution.

Official website : https://github.com/tikv/tikv

Dragonfly

Dragonfly, donated to CNCF in 2018, addresses image distribution challenges for Kubernetes‑based cloud‑native environments. It improves distribution efficiency with P2P and CDN, balances load dynamically, and secures transfers via HTTPS.

Adopted by companies such as China Mobile, Ant Financial, JD.com, and others, Dragonfly’s inclusion in CNCF marks a milestone for both the project and the foundation.

Official website : https://github.com/alibaba/Dragonfly