+++
title = "Congratulations on graduation of Apache ShardingSphere as a Top-Level Project!" 
weight = 3
chapter = true
+++

## Congratulations on graduation of Apache ShardingSphere as a Top-Level Project!


Apache Software Foundation (ASF), The most popular open-source software foundation, announced Apache ShardingSphere as a Top-Level Project (TLP) on Wakefield, MA, 16th April 2020.

ShardingSphere entered into the Apache incubator since 10th November 2018. With the help of mentors and the whole community, The Apache board approved its graduation proposal with 10 +1 votes successfully, which ends up its 17 months incubator and promotes it as TLP.

As the first project graduating from Incubator in 2020, this cheering news was published subsequently on Apache official blog with the support of Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity of ASF.

Apache ShardingSphere was born in dangdang.com, grew up fastly in JD.com, and now becomes a famous Apache distributed database middleware ecosystem. The evolvement from a light JDBC driver into an ecosystem presents the efforts and enthusiasm of the whole community in the past 17 months.

Special thanks for the guidance from IPMCs, mentors. Many thanks for contributions from 120+ committers all over the world. What's more, we are glad to see the community still move actively during the coronavirus outbreak. 
