Apache Ignite vs Alluxio (former Tachyon)

Well, ever since the company behind the read-only open-source project called Tachyon has decided to change the name of the project, I was puzzled. If you build something successful, you want the name of it to be recognized, right? In marketing, it is called “brand recognition”.

Why would Coca-Cola rename their product into SludgeWaters? Indeed, it doesn’t make much sense! The most infamous brand-recognition screw-up was when SUNW (Sun Microsystems) got renamed to JAVA on the NASDAQ. And _that_ ended well, for sure. The brilliant idea belonged to the Silicon Valley class-clown with the pony-tail. I am sure you know, whom I refer to.

At any rate, why an allegedly successful software project would change its name in a middle of the rise? I have a hypothesis, that it has been caused by the fact that any time one searches for Tachyon on Google (or elsewhere), the first link popping-up would be to my blog from last year and the close second would point to the story how Tachyon BDFL has decided to remove my benign answer from their public mail list.

So, in the interest of the history preservation, I am putting up the new one, but correcting the name to reflect new reality of Alluxio project. The technical findings stand the same, so just go and read the year old blog to figure where the old application with the new name is falling short.

The last but not least, since the time of the original write-up, Apache Ignite has graduated to Apache TLP project, that’s why the “(incubating)” suffix is dropped as well 😉