2024 Dragonfly Community Year in Review: A Year of Innovation, Collaboration, and Top Contributors

As the year draws to a close, it's the perfect time to look back and celebrate the milestones the Dragonfly community has achieved over the past twelve months. It's been an exciting year full of contributions, events, and growth. Let's start with some amazing news: we've hit the milestone of 26,000 GitHub stars! This incredible achievement is a testament to the enthusiasm and support from our growing community.

From standout contributions, the launch of Dragonfly Cloud, to key events that strengthened our ties to the modern data infrastructure ecosystem, this blog post highlights the moments that made this year truly special.

Top Community Contributors of 2024

Throughout the year, we've celebrated standout contributors who went above and beyond to support Dragonfly. Whether through code contributions, sharing feedback, or fostering community engagement, these individuals have demonstrated outstanding leadership and dedication. Let's take a moment to acknowledge their hard work:

• Michael Primeaux identified a server flag compatibility issue and followed up with a timely pull request that resolved it. His keen eye and swift action set a high standard for community problem-solving.
• Fabiano Arruda made a pull request to enhance the Helm charts for CI and local development, enabling templates to be rendered both locally and on build agents where they are not running in Kubernetes cluster. His updates also streamlined certificate creation by removing the dependency on a pre-existing issuer, making it easier to use self-signed certificates.
• Zixuan Zhao optimized HyperLogLog (HLL) memory usage in Dragonfly. In previous versions, HLL didn't use sparse mode correctly, leading to higher memory consumption for keys with a small number of items. The fix brought a significant improvement in memory efficiency—an invaluable contribution. Since then, Zixuan has made several other crucial contributions related to GEO and ACL commands.
• Zacharya Haitin, one of our long-standing contributors, initially added Prometheus metrics support back in 2022. This year, Zacharya continued to enhance Dragonfly with fixes and improvements, particularly around benchmark tests.
• Aymen Ben Tanfous contributed to the Dragonfly Kubernetes Operator and restored the Helm chart release CI job, ensuring GitHub Actions automation is fully operational again. His work has helped keep our development processes running smoothly.
• Daniel Moran delivered the largest external PR in Dragonfly's history—a massive 13.7k lines of code—to add tests using fakeredis. This substantial effort significantly boosted Dragonfly's compatibility with Redis commands.
• Lakshya Garg contributed the ALLCOMMANDS and NOCOMMANDS shortcuts for the ACL command family. While seemingly straightforward, this addition reflects Lakshya's dedication to improving Dragonfly's consistency and usability. It is always thoughtful contributions like this that keep the project moving forward.
• Joakim Rishaug demonstrated exceptional coding skills and effective communication in implementing the HEXPIRE and FIELDEXPIRE commands. His work showcased a deep understanding of Dragonfly's codebase and a commitment to engaging with maintainers and peers for feedback.

These individuals embody the spirit of the Dragonfly community, and we're grateful for their and all other contributors' efforts in helping us grow and innovate.

Event Highlights

This year, we hosted and participated in numerous online and in-person events, engaging the Dragonfly community in various ways. From insightful webinars and technical workshops to vibrant meetups, summits, and conferences, there was something for everyone. In case you missed any, be sure to visit our Dragonfly Events page to catch up on recordings and highlights.

KubeCon in Paris – March 2024

KubeCon in Paris was one of the major highlights of the year, where the Dragonfly team had the opportunity to engage with the broader Kubernetes community. Our participation in various panels and sessions showcased the power of Dragonfly in cloud-native environments.

One of the memorable moments was our Community Clink Happy Hour, co-hosted with Dagger and Scarf, where we had lively discussions with both new and experienced users. The networking opportunities were invaluable, and we formed new partnerships that have continued to benefit the community.

Key moments from KubeCon Paris:

• A deep dive into the licensing trade-offs in open-source startups by Nick Gottlieb, VP of Marketing at Dragonfly (watch the recording below).
• A vibrant community happy hour when we connected with over 100 attendees, discussing the future of cloud-native tooling.

London DevOps – October 2024

One of our most exciting moments this year was Roman's trip to London, where he gave a well-received talk at the London DevOps community event. Roman's presentation on the future of scaling stateful workloads in Kubernetes environments was a highlight of the event.

Key moments from London DevOps:

• Roman Gershman, co-founder and CTO of Dragonfly, shared insights on scaling stateful workloads in the modern cloud era (watch the recording below).
• Networking with London's DevOps community and building stronger ties.

KubeCon in Salt Lake City – November 2024

This year's KubeCon in Salt Lake City was another highlight where the team was once again on the global stage. With a special focus on the growing interest in cloud-native solutions, our sessions attracted a wide audience. It was inspiring to see so many attendees interested in learning more about the Dragonfly platform.

Key moments from KubeCon Salt Lake City:

• Joe Zhou, Developer Advocate at Dragonfly, gave a presentation on vertical vs. horizontal scalability of data infrastructure in cloud-native environments at the Intel theater.
• The Modern Data Infrastructure Happy Hour, co-hosted with TiDB and Dremio, where we discussed the latest trends in data infrastructure and the networking was fantastic!

AWS re:Invent – December 2024

This week, December 2–6, 2024, we'll have a strong presence at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Software development, AI, DevOps, data infrastructure, and cloud-native communities are expected to show great interest in Dragonfly, especially around performance, scalability, and automation in AWS environments. We're excited to participate in this event and look forward to engaging with you all. If you're interested in Dragonfly, drop by our booth (#1641) or book an appointment with us!

• Book an appointment with us at AWS re:Invent -> here.
• Register for the Modern Data Infrastructure Cocktails (December 4, 2024) -> here. This event is co-hosted by Dragonfly, TiDB, and AuthZed.

Looking Ahead to 2025

Last but not least, this year also marked a significant milestone with the launch of Dragonfly Cloud—a gift to our community and cloud users, making it easier than ever to harness the power of Dragonfly. As we celebrate this year's successes, we're already planning for the next! Expect even more exciting announcements, product updates, and events as we continue to grow.

We're incredibly thankful for the contributions from all our members, whether they've been with us for years or just joined. Thank you to everyone who made 2024 a fantastic year!

Stay tuned for what's to come in 2025. If you haven't yet, join our community on the Discord server and the Dragonfly forum, and let's continue building together. Want to be featured in next year's roundup? Contribute to Dragonfly on GitHub, attend our events, and get involved in the discussions. We'd love to see you at our next meetup or webinar!