The impact of Apache Polaris graduating to top-level Apache project

Apache Polaris has become a top-level project under the Apache Software Foundation, marking its maturity and community governance after successfully incubating since August 2024. With over 100 contributors and more than 2,800 pull requests, Polaris has addressed the catalog gap in the Apache Iceberg ecosystem by providing a community-driven, open standard for metadata management, which was previously reliant on proprietary solutions like AWS Glue and Unity Catalog. Polaris's implementation of the Iceberg REST API spec enables seamless interoperability across various data engines, fostering open lakehouse architectures that support both analytics and AI workloads. Fivetran has built its Iceberg REST Catalog on Polaris to ensure vendor neutrality and accessibility across cloud providers and query engines, reinforcing the stability and long-term governance of its infrastructure. For Fivetran customers, this graduation ensures that their data infrastructure remains robust and community-backed, with Polaris continuing to handle metadata for Iceberg tables without any changes to current operations.