Apache Gravitino — 2025 Summary

Introduction

2025 was a landmark year for Apache Gravitino. The project not only graduated as a Top-Level Project (TLP) but also reached its first major stable release, version 1.0.0. Throughout the year, the community focused heavily on "Contextual Engineering" and "AI-native" metadata management, introducing groundbreaking features like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the Lance REST service, and a metadata-driven action system. This article summarizes the milestones and achievements of Apache Gravitino in 2025.

Timeline

Apache Gravitino officially graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project on June 3, 2025, marking a significant maturity milestone.

In 2025, the community released several key versions, including the major 1.0.0 release and significant feature updates in 0.8.0-incubating, 0.9.0-incubating, and 1.1.0.

• 2025.01.24: Version 0.8.0-incubating released
  • Focused on strengthening AI support with the introduction of the Model Catalog.
  • Introduced credential vending for Filesets and new connectors for Flink (Iceberg/Paimon).
• 2025.05.07: Version 0.9.0-incubating released
  • Enhanced data governance with a new Data Lineage interface (OpenLineage compliant).
  • Added gcli script for better CLI experience and improved security with privilege refinements.
• 2025.09.24: Version 1.0.0 released
  • The first stable major release, themed "From Metadata Management to Contextual Engineering."
  • Introduced the Metadata-driven Action System (including Statistics, Policies, and Jobs).
  • Launched the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server, enabling AI Agents/LLMs to interact directly with metadata.
  • Implemented unified Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) across catalogs.
• 2025.11.20: Version 1.0.1 released
  • A stability release featuring smarter job templates and improved Python client support.
• 2025.12.19: Version 1.1.0 released
  • Added the Lance REST service to support vector data for AI workloads.
  • Introduced a Generic Lakehouse Catalog and support for Hive 3 and multi-cluster HDFS filesets.
  • Hardened security for the Iceberg REST service.

Key Features & Improvements

In 2025, Gravitino evolved from a unified catalog to an active metadata control plane. Key technical achievements include:

1. AI & LLM Integration: The project positioned itself as an AI-native catalog by introducing the Model Catalog for managing ML models and the MCP Server to connect AI agents with data context. The addition of the Lance REST service in v1.1.0 further solidified support for vector datasets.
2. Metadata-Driven Actions: A new framework allowing users to define policies (e.g., TTL, compaction) and execute jobs based on metadata, moving beyond passive metadata storage.
3. Unified Governance & Security: Full implementation of RBAC, credential vending for secure data access (S3/GCS/ADLS), and a unified authentication flow for Iceberg REST services.
4. Ecosystem Expansion: Broadened support with new connectors (Generic Lakehouse, Hive 3, Flink, Paimon) and enhancements to the GVFS (Gravitino Virtual File System) for unified file management.

Community

The Apache Gravitino community saw explosive growth in 2025, evolving from an incubator project into a Top-Level Project (TLP) backed by a rapidly expanding global ecosystem.

• Top-Level Graduation: On June 3, 2025, the project officially graduated to an Apache Top-Level Project, a major milestone marking its maturity in community health, vendor-neutral governance, and production readiness.
• Community Growth (Year-over-Year):
  • Engagement: GitHub stars increased by over 130%, ending the year above 2,600. Forks grew by approximately 150%, reflecting a surge in community-led integrations and local developments.
  • Contributor Base: The active developer community expanded by nearly 100%. Recent major releases, such as version 1.1.0, featured contributions from 40+ unique developers representing a wide variety of global organizations.
  • Development Velocity: Development pace accelerated significantly, with code commits reaching a lifetime total of over 3,300 commits.
  • Post-Graduation Committer Growth: July 7, 2025: Chenxi Pan was added as Committers. December 15, 2025: Junda Yang and Yangyang Zhong were added as Committers.
• Global Presence: The project established itself as the standard for federated metadata through featured presentations at Community Over Code (NA & Asia) and QCon Shanghai, gathering critical production feedback from global data engineering teams to shape the future roadmap.

Industry Trends in Metadata Management (2026)

1. Breaking Lakehouse Silos: As organizations adopt multiple "open" table formats, the risk of "format lock-in" has replaced "vendor lock-in." The trend is toward Universal Lakehouse architectures that provide a single entry point for fragmented data silos.
2. The Multimodal AI Explosion: AI workloads are moving beyond tabular data to include massive volumes of unstructured assets (images, video, audio). Traditional data stacks are being replaced by AI-Native Multimodal Stacks that can process complex data types with the same governance as SQL tables.
3. Emergence of Data Agents: AI Agents are becoming the primary consumers of data. These agents require "Context Engineering"—a way to use metadata as an external brain to discover, understand, and act upon data autonomously.
4. Escalating AI Security Risks: The high-speed nature of AI interactions makes traditional static security (RBAC) obsolete. The industry is moving toward Identity-Centric Zero Trust and Fine-Grained ABAC to prevent data leakage and ensure model safety.

Future Work

1. Universal Lakehouse & Format Interoperability

To solve the data silo problem, Gravitino is expanding its reach to provide a unified management layer for the modern Lakehouse.

• Multi-Format Support: We will provide first-class support for Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, and Paimon. By acting as a "Catalog of Catalogs," Gravitino allows users to manage multiple formats through a single interface, significantly reducing vendor lock-in and simplifying cross-format governance.

2. Multimodal Data Stack for the AI Era

Gravitino is evolving to empower a new generation of AI-native data stacks.

• Ecosystem Integration: We will focus on deep integration with AI-centric engines like Daft, Ray, and Lance.
• Empowering New Scenarios: By providing a unified metadata layer for these engines, Gravitino allows users to "reuse" existing data governance capabilities—like auditing and access control—for modern multimodal scenarios, giving the new AI data stack enterprise-grade maturity from day one.

3. Data Agent Orchestration (Metadata as the "Brain")

Gravitino will serve as the cognitive foundation for autonomous Data Agents.

• MCP Server & Action System: Leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and our Metadata Action System, we are exploring scenario-based capabilities for Data Agents. This allows an AI agent to not only "see" the data but also "act" on it—such as performing a schema update or triggering a compaction job—using metadata as its reasoning context.

4. Advanced Security: KMS & ABAC

As security threats become more sophisticated in the AI era, Gravitino is implementing more granular and automated security controls.

• ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control): We will implement an ABAC engine to enable fine-grained permissions. This allows access decisions to be made based on dynamic tags (e.g., Sensitivity=High) and environmental context rather than just static roles.
• KMS & Credential Management: To protect data-at-rest and in-transit, we are integrating with Key Management Services (KMS) .

2026 will be a defining year for AI-native data infrastructure, and the Gravitino community is just getting started.Whether you’re exploring federated lakehouse architectures, multimodal AI data stacks, or data agents in production, we welcome you to build and evolve Apache Gravitino together with us❤️.

https://gravitino.apache.org/blog/2025-summary/