What Is Ignite 3?
Apache Ignite has existed for more than six years. During these years, Ignite evolved a lot. The SQL engine became more comprehensive, page-memory architecture and the persistence layer were introduced, and many features were added. These advancements make Ignite an extremely powerful tool, suitable for a wide variety of use cases from basic caching to complicated, multi-component data integration hubs. However, such power came with a price. The new capabilities were implemented as additions to the existing codebase; that is, Ignite experienced no significant architectural or API changes. As a result, configurations, APIs, and Ignite behaviors are not always consistent and intuitive, and, therefore, Ignite can be quite hard to use, especially for beginners.
Ignite 3 is a significant step in the ongoing effort to modernize the product. Because Ignite is one of the most feature-rich of the open-source, distributed databases, the focus is on improving usability and adapting Ignite to modern, cloud-based deployments, not on adding new features. Also, Ignite 3.0 will provide a way to advance the database engine by adding features and capabilities that were difficult to add to the Ignite 2.x baseline. But let’s postpone those conversations and dive into the first milestone: Ignite 3.0.