Igniters, Throughout the history of our project, we could see how the addition of certain features required us to reassess the project's name and category.
Before Ignite joined the ASF, it supported only compute APIs resembling the MapReduce engine of Hadoop. Those days, it was fair to define Ignite as "a distributed in-memory computing engine". Next, at the time of the project donation, it already included key-value/SQL/transactional APIs, was used as a distributed cache, and significantly outgrew the "in-memory computing engine" use case. That's how the project transitioned to the product category of in-memory caches and we started to name it as an "in-memory data grid" or "in-memory computing platform" to differentiate from classical caching products such as Memcached and Redis. Nowadays, the project outgrew its caching use case, and the classification of Ignite as an "in-memory data grid" or "in-memory computing platform" doesn't sound accurate. We rebuilt our storage engine by replacing a typical key-value engine with a B-tree engine that spans across memory and disk tiers. And it's not surprising to see more deployments of Ignite as a database on its own. So, it feels like we need to reconsider Ignite positioning again so that a) application developers can discover it easily via search engines and b) the project can stand out from in-memory projects with intersecting capabilities. To the point, I'm suggesting to reposition Ignite in one of the following ways: 1. Ignite is a "distributed X database". We are indeed a distributed partitioned database where X can be "multi-tiered" or "memory-first" to emphasize that we are more than an in-memory database. 2. Keep defining Ignite as "an in-memory computing platform" but name our storage engine uniquely as "IgniteDB" to highlight that the platform is powered by a "distributed multi-tiered/memory-first database". What is your thinking? (Also, regardless of a selected name, Ignite still will be used as a cache and grid, and we're not going to stop appealing to those use cases. But those are just use cases while Ignite has to figure out its new identity ... again). - Denis
