What the 2022 Open‑Source Big Data Heat Report Reveals About the Next ‘Moore’s Law’

2022 Open‑Source Big Data Heat Report Released

On November 5, the Open Atom Open‑Source Foundation, X‑lab Open Lab, and Alibaba Open‑Source Committee jointly launched the 2022 Open‑Source Big Data Heat Report .

Key Findings

The report, based on public data from 102 of the most active open‑source big‑data projects, identifies a “Moore’s Law” for open‑source big‑data technology: every 40 months the heat value doubles, marking a full technical iteration. In the past eight years, five major heat‑value jumps occurred, with diversification, integration and cloud‑native becoming the most prominent trends.

Quantitative Analysis of the Post‑Hadoop Era

Hadoop, the origin of open‑source big‑data technology, has a 16‑year history since 2006. The report collects data from 2015 (the 10th year of Hadoop) to the present, defines a heat‑value model, and uses quantitative indicators to describe project activity and developer popularity.

Heat‑Value Trends

Heat values double every 40 months, and the technology cycle is accelerating. Over eight years, multiple heat transitions reflect rapid tech upgrades. Developers have consistently shown strong interest in “data query and analysis,” which has led the heat rankings for eight consecutive years.

2017 marked the shift where streaming heat surpassed batch processing, ushering in real‑time big‑data processing. Data scale continues to grow, and data structures diversify; “data integration” experienced explosive growth from 2020 onward.

Three Major Heat Trends

Diversification driven by varied user needs – “data lake” leads with a 34% annual compound growth rate, followed by “interactive analysis” and “DataOps”.

Integration – Since 2015, compute began integrating, with “stream‑batch integration” peaking in 2019; storage integration (e.g., Delta Lake, Iceberg, Hudi) surged from 2019.

Cloud‑Native – Cloud‑native projects have rapidly reshaped the open‑source stack; fields such as data integration, storage, and development now have new projects accounting for over 80% of heat.

Top‑30 Heat Rankings

From the 102 projects, the report selects the top 30 heat leaders. Kibana tops the list with a heat value of 989.40. ClickHouse (data query & analysis), Airflow (data scheduling & orchestration), Flink (stream processing) and Airbyte (data integration) each rank first in their sub‑domains. Chinese projects such as Pulsar, Doris, StarRocks, DolphinScheduler, and SeaTunnel also show strong heat trends, demonstrating that solving user pain points is a common success factor.

Thanks to Open‑Source China, InfoQ, Alibaba Cloud Developer Community, and 32 experts and contributors for their strategic support and contributions.