Why Alibaba’s RocketMQ Donation to Apache Could Transform Distributed Messaging

After previously donating JStorm, Alibaba has made another major open‑source contribution by donating its distributed messaging middleware RocketMQ to the Apache Software Foundation, where it will become an Apache incubating project.

RocketMQ, originally open‑sourced by Alibaba in 2012 and maintained by the Aliware middleware team, powers Alibaba’s production systems during major events like Double 11, handling billions of messages with high stability and low latency. Its commercial version is available on Alibaba Cloud.

The donation positions RocketMQ as the first Chinese internet middleware to become a top‑level Apache project, joining the ranks of ActiveMQ and Kafka, and highlights the growing importance of message‑queue technologies in IoT and big‑data scenarios.

Aliware team lead Xiao Xie noted that the core developers have extensive experience in distributed systems and hold dozens of high‑quality patents. The commercial Aliware MQ processes trillions of messages daily, supports multiple protocols (HTTP, MQTT, TCP), and serves over 1,000 paying enterprise customers.

The open‑source community around RocketMQ is highly active, with large domestic chat groups and hundreds of global issues. It has received the CJK OSS award and has been featured on the popular open‑source portal awesome‑java.

Alibaba’s broader open‑source contributions exceed 115 projects, including AliSQL and Weex, and its experts hold positions in international foundations such as MariaDB.

According to Xiao Xie, Apache’s community ethos will drive further development of world‑class, ecosystem‑friendly projects, and Alibaba invites developers to join in building leading distributed core infrastructure.

Additionally, Alibaba announced an online technical innovation session for Double 11 on December 6‑7, where experts will discuss the underlying technologies behind the event’s success.