Apache Paimon

Apache Paimon is an open-source data lake house format designed for high-throughput streaming and efficient data lake storage. It was originally incubated as a project within the Apache Flink community, specifically emerging from the Alibaba Group as Flink Table Store. It was designed to address the need for a streaming data lake format that supports high-speed data ingestion and low-latency queries.

The project transitioned to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) where it underwent incubation before becoming a Top-Level Project (TLP) in early 2024. As an open-source project, its code is developed and maintained by a global community of contributors from various tech companies, including Alibaba, Bilibili, ByteDance, and many others, though the primary leadership and architectural roots remain closely tied to the engineers who created it at Alibaba.

Ownership of Apache Paimon is non-commercial, as it belongs to the Apache Software Foundation, a US-based non-profit entity. This ensures that the technology remains vendor-neutral and accessible to all developers globally under the Apache License 2.0.