The Chinese company Tencent joins the Platinum members of the Linux Foundation and puts its frameworks, Tars, and TSeer in open source.
The first concerns the management of micro-services, the second concerns the discovery of services and registration. Last March, Tencent had already created an IA project within the foundation with nine other providers, including Baidu, Huawei, and ZTE.
Tencent, one of China’s leading web service providers, becomes a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation along with his compatriot Huawei. It means he supports the foundation that oversees some of the world’s leading open source projects with an annual amount of more than $500,000. By becoming a Platinum member, the group based in Shenzhen is also bringing one of its leaders to the Linux Foundation board of directors. It is Liu Xin, CEO of Tencent’s mobile Internet entity.
Two other Chinese providers, Alibaba and Baidu, are also Gold members of the foundation and pay $100,000 a year to contribute to the organization.
Meanwhile, Tencent announces that it is putting two of its projects in open source under the leadership of the Linux Foundation.
The first, Tars, is a high-performance RPC framework designed for the development, implementation, and maintenance of micro-services. It is based on the naming of services using the tars protocol and provides a platform to operate semi-automatically. The project allows users to perform procedures remotely and supports C++, Java, Node.js, PHP and Python languages. A construction system and a code generation tool for agile development accompany it.
The second project, TSeer, is a light version of Tars. This fault-tolerant framework allows discovery and registration of services. The framework is used in Tencent products such as QQ Browser, App Store or Mobile Manager and handles an average of 10 billion requests every day. In a statement, vice president of Tencent, Zeng Yu, said the Chinese group has more than ten years of experience managing interactions with large numbers of users, “enabling Tars and TSeer to optimize load balancing and fault tolerance systems entirely.
Founding member of LF Deep Learning Foundation
Tencent’s growing involvement in free software comes a few months after the creation, last March, already within the Linux Foundation, of the LF Deep Learning Foundation.
The project’s goal is to support innovation in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning by making these technologies available to developers. Tencent is one of its founding members along with three other Chinese providers, Baidu, Huawei and ZTE, and nine other members, including French Orange.
The Shenzhen Group contributes to the LF Deep Learning Foundation through its Angel Artificial Intelligence Project, a high-performance distributed machine learning platform it has developed with Beijing University. The description of this platform, designed for large data models, mentions that it can support more than a billion parameters. At the end of 2017, Tencent was the first Chinese technology company valued at more than $500 million on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, ahead of Alibaba. The latter, also heavily involved in artificial intelligence, announced in February IA services in its cloud in Europe.