Kubernetes
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Google expands its container service with GKE Advanced
With its Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Cloud has long offered a managed service for running containers on its platform. Kubernetes users tend to have a variety of needs, but so far, Google only offered a single tier of GKE that wasn’t necessarily geared toward the high-end enterprise users the company is trying to woo. Today, however, the company announced a new advanced edition of GKE that introduces a number of new features and an enhanced financially backed SLA, additional security tools and new automation features. You can think of GKE Advanced as the enterprise version of GKE.
The new service will launch in the second quarter of the year and hasn’t yet announced pricing. The regular version of GKE is now called GKE Standard.
Google says the service builds upon the company’s own learnings from running a complex container infrastructure internally for years.
For enterprise customers, the financially backed SLA is surely a nice bonus. The promise here is 99.95 percent guaranteed availability for regional clusters.
Most users who opt for a managed Kubernetes environment do so because they don’t want to deal with the hassle of managing these clusters themselves. With GKE Standard, there’s still some work to be done with regard to scaling the clusters. Because of this, GKE Advanced includes a Vertical Pod Autoscaler that keeps on eye on resource utilization and adjusts it as necessary, as well as Node Auto Provisioning, an enhanced version of cluster autoscaling in GKE Standard.
In addition to these new GKE Advanced features, Google is adding GKE security features like the GKE Sandbox, which is currently in beta and will come exclusively to GKE Advanced once it’s launched, and the ability to enforce that only signed and verified images are used in the container environment.
The Sandbox uses Google’s gVisor container sandbox runtime. With this, every sandbox gets its own user-space kernel, adding an additional layer of security. With Binary Authorization, GKE Advanced users also can ensure that all container images are signed by a trusted authority before they are put into production. Somebody could theoretically still smuggle malicious code into the containers, but this process, which enforces standard container release practices, for example, should ensure that only authorized containers can run in the environment.
GKE Advanced also includes support for GKE usage metering, which allows companies to keep tabs on who is using a GKE cluster and charge them according. This feature, too, will be exclusive to GKE Advanced.
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OpenStack Stein launches with improved Kubernetes support
The OpenStack project, which powers more than 75 public and thousands of private clouds, launched the 19th version of its software this week. You’d think that after 19 updates to the open-source infrastructure platform, there really isn’t all that much new the various project teams could add, given that we’re talking about a rather stable code base here. There are actually a few new features in this release, though, as well as all the usual tweaks and feature improvements you’d expect.
While the hype around OpenStack has died down, we’re still talking about a very active open-source project. On average, there were 155 commits per day during the Stein development cycle. As far as development activity goes, that keeps OpenStack on the same level as the Linux kernel and Chromium.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of that development activity focused on Kubernetes and the tools to manage these container clusters. With this release, the team behind the OpenStack Kubernetes installer brought the launch time for a cluster down from about 10 minutes to five, regardless of the number of nodes. To further enhance Kubernetes support, OpenStack Stein also includes updates to Neutron, the project’s networking service, which now makes it easier to create virtual networking ports in bulk as containers are spun up, and Ironic, the bare-metal provisioning service.
All of that is no surprise, given that according to the project’s latest survey, 61 percent of OpenStack deployments now use both Kubernetes and OpenStack in tandem.
The update also includes a number of new networking features that are mostly targeted at the many telecom users. Indeed, over the course of the last few years, telcos have emerged as some of the most active OpenStack users as these companies are looking to modernize their infrastructure as part of their 5G rollouts.
Besides the expected updates, though, there are also a few new and improved projects here that are worth noting.
“The trend from the last couple of releases has been on scale and stability, which is really focused on operations,” OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce told me. “The new projects — and really most of the new projects from the last year — have all been pretty oriented around real-world use cases.”
The first of these is Placement. “As people build a cloud and start to grow it and it becomes more broadly adopted within the organization, a lot of times, there are other requirements that come into play,” Bryce explained. “One of these things that was pretty simplistic at the beginning was how a request for a resource was actually placed on the underlying infrastructure in the data center.” But as users get more sophisticated, they often want to run specific workloads on machines with certain hardware requirements. These days, that’s often a specific GPU for a machine learning workload, for example. With Placement, that’s a bit easier now.
It’s worth noting that OpenStack had some of this functionality before. The team, however, decided to uncouple it from the existing compute service and turn it into a more generic service that could then also be used more easily beyond the compute stack, turning it more into a kind of resource inventory and tracking tool.
Then, there is also Blazer, a reservation service that offers OpenStack users something akin to AWS Reserved Instances. In a private cloud, the use case for a feature is a bit different, though. But as some of the private clouds got bigger, some users found that they needed to be able to guarantee resources to run some of their regular, overnight batch jobs or data analytics workloads, for example.
As far as resource management goes, it’s also worth highlighting Sahara, which now makes it easier to provision Hadoop clusters on OpenStack.
In previous releases, one of the focus areas for the project was to improve the update experience. OpenStack is obviously a very complex system, so bringing it up to the latest version is also a bit of a complex undertaking. These improvements are now paying off. “Nobody even knows we are running Stein right now,” Vexxhost CEO Mohammed Nasar, who made an early bet on OpenStack for his service, told me. “And I think that’s a good thing. You want to be least impactful, especially when you’re in such a core infrastructure level. […] That’s something the projects are starting to become more and more aware of but it’s also part of the OpenStack software in general becoming much more stable.”
As usual, this release launched only a few weeks before the OpenStack Foundation hosts its bi-annual Summit in Denver. Since the OpenStack Foundation has expanded its scope beyond the OpenStack project, though, this event also focuses on a broader range of topics around open-source infrastructure. It’ll be interesting to see how this will change the dynamics at the event.
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Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure
Google’s Cloud Services Platform for managing hybrid clouds that span on-premise data centers and the Google cloud is coming out of beta today. The company is also changing the product’s name to Anthos, a name that either refers to a lost Greek tragedy, the name of an obscure god in the Marvel universe or rosemary. That by itself would be interesting, but minor news. What makes this interesting is that Google also today announced that Anthos will run on third-party clouds, as well, including AWS and Azure.
“We will support Anthos and AWS and Azure as well, so people get one way to manage their application and that one way works across their on-premise environments and all other clouds,” Google’s senior VP for its technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, explained in a press conference ahead of today’s announcement.
So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.
“You can use one consistent approach — one open-source based approach — across all environments,” Hölzle said. “I can’t really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it’s not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three cloud — and actually on-premise environments, too — look the same.”
Anthos/Google Cloud Services Platform is based on the Google Kubernetes Engine, as well as other open-source projects like the Istio service mesh. It’s also hardware agnostic, meaning that users can take their current hardware and run the service on top of that without having to immediately invest in new servers.
Why is Google doing this? “We hear from our customers that multi-cloud and hybrid is really an acute pain point,” Hölzle said. He noted that containers are the enabling technology for this but that few enterprises have developed a unifying strategy to manage these deployments and that it takes expertise in all major clouds to get the most out of them.
Enterprises already have major investments in their infrastructure and created relationships with their vendors, though, so it’s no surprise that Google is launching Anthos with more than 30 major hardware and software partners that range from Cisco to Dell EMC, HPE and VMware, as well as application vendors like Confluent, Datastax, Elastic, Portworx, Tigera, Splunk, GitLab, MongoDB and others.
Robin.io, a data management service that offers a hyper-converged storage platform based on Kubernetes, also tells me that it worked closely with Google to develop the Anthos Storage API. “Robin Storage offers bare metal performance, powerful data management capabilities and Kubernetes-native management to support running enterprise applications on Google Cloud’s Anthos across on-premises data centers and the cloud,” said Premal Buch, CEO of Robin.io.
Anthos is a subscription-based service, with the list prices starting at $10,000/month per 100 vCPU block. Enterprise prices will then be up for negotiation, though, so many customers will likely pay less.
It’s one thing to use a service like this for new applications, but many enterprises already have plenty of line-of-business tools that they would like to bring to the cloud as well. For them, Google is launching the first beta of Anthos Migrate today. This service will auto-migrate VMs from on-premises or other clouds into containers in the Google Kubernetes Engine. The promise here is that this is essentially an automatic process and once the container is on Google’s platform, you’ll be able to use all of the other features that come with the Anthos platform, too.
Google’s Hölzle noted that the emphasis here was on making this migration as easy as possible. “There’s no manual effort there,” he said.
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Google Cloud Run brings serverless and containers together
Two of the biggest trends in applications development in recent years have been the rise of serverless and containerization. Today at Google Cloud Next, the company announced a new product called Cloud Run that is designed to bring the two together. At the same time, the company also announced Cloud Run for GKE, which is specifically designed to run on Google’s version of Kubernetes.
Oren Teich, director of product management for serverless, says these products came out of discussions with customers. As he points out, developers like the flexibility and agility they get using serverless architecture, but have been looking for more than just compute resources. They want to get access to the full stack, and to that end the company is announcing Cloud Run.
“Cloud Run is introducing a brand new product that takes Docker containers and instantly gives you a URL. This is completely unique in the industry. We’re taking care of everything from the top end of SSL provisioning and routing, all the way down to actually running the container for you. You pay only by the hundred milliseconds of what you need to use, and it’s end-to-end managed,” Teich explained.
As for the GKE tool, it provides the same kinds of benefits, except for developers running their containers on Google’s GKE version of Kubernetes. Keep in mind, developers could be using any version of Kubernetes their organizations happen to have chosen, so it’s not a given that they will be using Google’s flavor of Kubernetes.
“What this means is that a developer can take the exact same experience, the exact same code they’ve written — and they have G Cloud command line, the same UI and our console and they can just with one-click target the destination they want,” he said.
All of this is made possible through yet another open-source project the company introduced last year called Knative. “Cloud Run is based on Knative, an open API and runtime environment that lets you run your serverless workloads anywhere you choose — fully managed on Google Cloud Platform, on your GKE cluster or on your own self-managed Kubernetes cluster,” Teich and Eyal Manor, VP of engineering, wrote in a blog post introducing Cloud Run.
Serverless, as you probably know by now, is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not really taking away servers, but it is eliminating the need for developers to worry about them. Instead of loading their application on a particular virtual machine, the cloud provider, in this case, Google, provisions the exact level of resources required to run an operation. Once that’s done, these resources go away, so you only pay for what you use at any given moment.
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Densify announces new tool to optimize container management in the cloud
Densify, a Toronto company that helps customers optimize their cloud resources to control usage and spending, announced a new tool today specifically designed to optimize container usage in the cloud.
Company CEO Gerry Smith says that as containerization proliferates, it’s getting more difficult to track and control cloud infrastructure resource usage as software development and deployment happens with increasing speed.
“The whole basis upon which people buy and use cloud and container resources has become wildly expensive because of the lack of a resource management system,” Smith said.
The Densify solution looks at the consumption and for ways to cut costs and usage. “We have analytics in the cloud, any of various common cloud services that you can connect to, and then we use machine learning to analyze the resources and your cloud and container consumption,” he said.
Densify continuously makes recommendations on how to make better use of resources and to find the cheapest computing, whether that’s reserved instances, spot instances or other discounted cloud resources.
What’s more, it can help you identify whether you are providing too few resources to accommodate the number of containers you are deploying, as well as too many.
This may sound a bit like what Spotinst and Cloudyn, the company Microsoft bought a couple of years ago, do in terms of helping control costs in the cloud, but Smith says for his company it’s more about understanding the resources than pure cost.
“We look at ourselves as a resource management platform. So what we do is characterize the applications, demands of CPU and all the other resources, and use machine learning to predict what it’s going to need at any given minute, at any given day of a week of the year, so that we can then better predictively match the right supply,” Smith explained.
It’s providing information about each container at a highly detailed level, including “what’s running, what resources are being allocated, and the true utilization of an organization’s Kubernetes environment at a cluster, namespace and container level,” according to the company. All of this information should help DevOps teams better understand the resources required by their container deployments.
The company has actually been around since 2006 under the name Cirba. In its early guise it helped companies manage VMware installations. In 2016, it pivoted to cloud resource management and changed the company name to Densify. It has raised around $60 million since inception, with about half of that coming after the company changed to Densify in 2016.
The company is based in Toronto, but has offices in London and Melbourne, as well.
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Cloud Foundry ❤ Kubernetes
Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service project that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies use to help them build, test and deploy their applications, launched well before Kubernetes existed. Because of this, the team ended up building Diego, its own container management service. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of Kubernetes, which has become somewhat of the de facto standard for container orchestration, a number of companies in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem starting looking into how they could use Kubernetes to replace Diego.
The result of this is Project Eirini, which was first proposed by IBM. As the Cloud Foundry Foundation announced today, Project Eirini now passes the core functional tests the team runs to validate the software releases of its application runtime, the core Cloud Foundry service that deploys and manages applications (if that’s a bit confusing, don’t even think about the fact that there’s also a Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, which already uses Kubernetes, but which is mostly meant to give enterprise a single platform for running their own applications and pre-built containers from third-party vendors).
“That’s a pretty big milestone,” Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me. “The project team now gets to shift to a mode where they’re focused on hardening the solution and making it a bit more production-ready. But at this point, early adopters are also starting to deploy that [new] architecture.”
Childers stressed that while the project was incubated by IBM, which has been a long-time backer of the overall Cloud Foundry project, Google, Pivotal and others are now also contributing and have dedicated full-time engineers working on the project. In addition, SUSE, SAP and IBM are also active in developing Eirini.
Eirini started as an incubation project, and while few doubted that this would be a successful project, there was a bit of confusion around how Cloud Foundry would move forward now that it essentially had two container engines for running its core service. At the time, there was even some concern that the project could fork. “I pushed back at the time and said: no, this is the natural exploration process that open-source communities need to go through,” Childers said. “What we’re seeing now is that with Pivotal and Google stepping in, that’s a very clear sign that this is going to be the go-forward architecture for the future of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.”
A few months ago, by the way, Kubernetes was still missing a few crucial pieces the Cloud Foundry ecosystem needed to make this move. Childers specifically noted that Windows support — something the project’s enterprise users really need — was still problematic and lacked some important features. In recent releases, though, the Kubernetes team fixed most of these issues and improved its Windows support, rendering those issues moot.
What does all of this mean for Diego? Childers noted that the community isn’t at a point where it’ll hold developing that tool. At some point, though, it seems likely that the community will decide that it’s time to start the transition period and make the move to Kubernetes official.
It’s worth noting that IBM today announced its own preview of Eirini in its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment and that the latest version of SUSE’s Cloud Foundry-based Application Platform includes a similar preview as well.
In addition, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is hosting its semi-annual developer conference in Philadelphia this week, also announced that it has certified it first to systems integrators, Accenture and HCL as part of its recently launched certification program for companies that work in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and have at least 10 certified developers on their teams.
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Open-source communities fight over telco market
When you think of MWC Barcelona, chances are you’re thinking about the newest smartphones and other mobile gadgets, but that’s only half the story. Actually, it’s probably far less than half the story because the majority of the business that’s done at MWC is enterprise telco business. Not too long ago, that business was all about selling expensive proprietary hardware. Today, it’s about moving all of that into software — and a lot of that software is open source.
It’s maybe no surprise then that this year, the Linux Foundation (LF) has its own booth at MWC. It’s not massive, but it’s big enough to have its own meeting space. The booth is shared by the three LF projects: the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Hyperleger and Linux Foundation Networking, the home of many of the foundational projects like ONAP and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) that power many a modern network. And with the advent of 5G, there’s a lot of new market share to grab here.
To discuss the CNCF’s role at the event, I sat down with Dan Kohn, the executive director of the CNCF.
At MWC, the CNCF launched its testbed for comparing the performance of virtual network functions on OpenStack and what the CNCF calls cloud-native network functions, using Kubernetes (with the help of bare-metal host Packet). The project’s results — at least so far — show that the cloud-native container-based stack can handle far more network functions per second than the competing OpenStack code.
“The message that we are sending is that Kubernetes as a universal platform that runs on top of bare metal or any cloud, most of your virtual network functions can be ported over to cloud-native network functions,” Kohn said. “All of your operating support system, all of your business support system software can also run on Kubernetes on the same cluster.”
OpenStack, in case you are not familiar with it, is another massive open-source project that helps enterprises manage their own data center software infrastructure. One of OpenStack’s biggest markets has long been the telco industry. There has always been a bit of friction between the two foundations, especially now that the OpenStack Foundation has opened up its organizations to projects that aren’t directly related to the core OpenStack projects.
I asked Kohn if he is explicitly positioning the CNCF/Kubernetes stack as an OpenStack competitor. “Yes, our view is that people should be running Kubernetes on bare metal and that there’s no need for a middle layer,” he said — and that’s something the CNCF has never stated quite as explicitly before but that was always playing in the background. He also acknowledged that some of this friction stems from the fact that the CNCF and the OpenStack foundation now compete for projects.
OpenStack Foundation, unsurprisingly, doesn’t agree. “Pitting Kubernetes against OpenStack is extremely counterproductive and ignores the fact that OpenStack is already powering 5G networks, in many cases in combination with Kubernetes,” OpenStack COO Mark Collier told me. “It also reflects a lack of understanding about what OpenStack actually does, by suggesting that it’s simply a virtual machine orchestrator. That description is several years out of date. Moving away from VMs, which makes sense for many workloads, does not mean moving away from OpenStack, which manages bare metal, networking and authentication in these environments through the Ironic, Neutron and Keystone services.”
Similarly, ex-OpenStack Foundation board member (and Mirantis co-founder) Boris Renski told me that “just because containers can replace VMs, this doesn’t mean that Kubernetes replaces OpenStack. Kubernetes’ fundamental design assumes that something else is there that abstracts away low-level infrastructure, and is meant to be an application-aware container scheduler. OpenStack, on the other hand, is specifically designed to abstract away low-level infrastructure constructs like bare metal, storage, etc.”
This overall theme continued with Kohn and the CNCF taking a swipe at Kata Containers, the first project the OpenStack Foundation took on after it opened itself up to other projects. Kata Containers promises to offer a combination of the flexibility of containers with the additional security of traditional virtual machines.
“We’ve got this FUD out there around Kata and saying: telco’s will need to use Kata, a) because of the noisy neighbor problem and b) because of the security,” said Kohn. “First of all, that’s FUD and second, micro-VMs are a really interesting space.”
He believes it’s an interesting space for situations where you are running third-party code (think AWS Lambda running Firecracker) — but telcos don’t typically run that kind of code. He also argues that Kubernetes handles noisy neighbors just fine because you can constrain how many resources each container gets.
It seems both organizations have a fair argument here. On the one hand, Kubernetes may be able to handle some use cases better and provide higher throughput than OpenStack. On the other hand, OpenStack handles plenty of other use cases, too, and this is a very specific use case. What’s clear, though, is that there’s quite a bit of friction here, which is a shame.
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New VMware Kubernetes product comes courtesy of Heptio acquisition
VMware announced a new Kubernetes product today called VMware Essential PKS, which has been created from its acquisition of Heptio for $550 million at the end of last year.
VMware already had two flavors of Kubernetes, a fully managed cloud product and an enterprise version with all of the components, such as registry and network, pre-selected by VMware. What this new version does is provide a completely open version of Kubernetes where the customer can choose all the components, giving a flexible option for those who want it, according to Scott Buchanan, senior director of product marketing for cloud-native apps at VMware.
Buchanan said the new product comes directly from the approach that Heptio had taken to selling Kubernetes prior to the acquisition. “We’re introducing a new offering called VMware Essential PKS, and that offering is a packaging of the approach that Heptio took to market and that gained a lot of traction, and that approach is a natural complement to the other Kubernetes products in the VMware portfolio,” he explained.
Buchanan acknowledged that a large part of the market is going to go for the fully managed or fully configured approaches, but there is a subset of buyers that will want more choice in their Kubernetes implementation.
“Larger enterprises with more complex infrastructure want to have a very customized approach to how they build out their architecture. They don’t want to be integrated. They just want a foundation on which to build because the organizations are larger and more complex and they’re also more likely to have an internal DevOps or SREOps team to operate the platform on a day-to-day basis,” he explained.
While these organizations want flexibility, they also require more of a consultative approach to the sale. Heptio had a 40-person field service engineering team that came over in the acquisition, and VMware is in the process of scaling that team. These folks consult with the customer and help them select the different components that make up a Kubernetes installation to fit the needs of each organization.
Buchanan, who also came over in the acquisition, says that being part of VMware (which is part of the Dell family of companies) means they have several layers of sales with VMware, Pivotal and Dell all selling the product.
Heptio is the Kubernetes startup founded by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, the two men who helped develop the technology while they were at Google. Heptio was founded in 2016 and raised $33.5 million prior to the acquisition, according to Crunchbase data.
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Google’s hybrid cloud platform is now in beta
Last July, at its Cloud Next conference, Google announced the Cloud Services Platform, its first real foray into bringing its own cloud services into the enterprise data center as a managed service. Today, the Cloud Services Platform (CSP) is launching into beta.
It’s important to note that the CSP isn’t — at least for the time being — Google’s way of bringing all of its cloud-based developer services to the on-premises data center. In other words, this is a very different project from something like Microsoft’s Azure Stack. Instead, the focus is on the Google Kubernetes Engine, which allows enterprises to then run their applications in both their own data centers and on virtually any cloud platform that supports containers.
As Google Cloud engineering director Chen Goldberg told me, the idea here it to help enterprises innovate and modernize. “Clearly, everybody is very excited about cloud computing, on-demand compute and managed services, but customers have recognized that the move is not that easy,” she said and noted that the vast majority of enterprises are adopting a hybrid approach. And while containers are obviously still a very new technology, she feels good about this bet on the technology because most enterprises are already adopting containers and Kubernetes — and they are doing so at exactly the same time as they are adopting cloud and especially hybrid clouds.
It’s important to note that CSP is a managed platform. Google handles all of the heavy lifting like upgrades and security patches. And for enterprises that need an easy way to install some of the most popular applications, the platform also supports Kubernetes applications from the GCP Marketplace.
As for the tech itself, Goldberg stressed that this isn’t just about Kubernetes. The service also uses Istio, for example, the increasingly popular service mesh that makes it easier for enterprises to secure and control the flow of traffic and API calls between its applications.
With today’s release, Google is also launching its new CSP Config Management tool to help users create multi-cluster policies and set up and enforce access controls, resource quotas and more. CSP also integrates with Google’s Stackdriver Monitoring service and continuous delivery platforms.
“On-prem is not easy,” Goldberg said, and given that this is the first time the company is really supporting software in a data center that is not its own, that’s probably an understatement. But Google also decided that it didn’t want to force users into a specific set of hardware specifications like Azure Stack does, for example. Instead, CSP sits on top of VMware’s vSphere server virtualization platform, which most enterprises already use in their data centers anyway. That surely simplifies things, given that this is a very well-understood platform.
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds etcd to its open-source stable
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be owned by IBM). Red Hat has now contributed this project to the CNCF.
Etcd, which is written in Go, is already a major component of many Kubernetes deployments, where it functions as a source of truth for coordinating clusters and managing the state of the system. Other open-source projects that use etcd include Cloud Foundry, and companies that use it in production include Alibaba, ING, Pinterest, Uber, The New York Times and Nordstrom.
“Kubernetes and many other projects like Cloud Foundry depend on etcd for reliable data storage. We’re excited to have etcd join CNCF as an incubation project and look forward to cultivating its community by improving its technical documentation, governance and more,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of CNCF, in today’s announcement. “Etcd is a fantastic addition to our community of projects.”
Today, etcd has well over 450 contributors and nine maintainers from eight different companies. The fact that it ended up at the CNCF is only logical, given that the foundation is also the host of Kubernetes. With this, the CNCF now plays host to 17 projects that fall under its “incubated technologies” umbrella. In addition to etcd, these include OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS Helm, Rook and Harbor. Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy have already graduated from this incubation stage.
That’s a lot of projects for one foundation to manage, but the CNCF community is also extraordinarily large. This week alone about 8,000 developers are converging on Seattle for KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, the organization’s biggest event yet, to talk all things containers. It surely helps that the CNCF has managed to bring competitors like AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle under a single roof to collaboratively work on building these new technologies. There is a risk of losing focus here, though, something that happened to the OpenStack project when it went through a similar growth and hype phase. It’ll be interesting to see how the CNCF will manage this as it brings on more projects (with Istio, the increasingly popular service mesh, being a likely candidate for coming over to the CNCF as well).
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