Seven Projects Now Hosted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation

In July 2015 the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to advance cloud application management and interoperability. The CNCF initially hosted a single project, the Kubernetes container orchestration and management system. Today, the CNCF hosts seven different open-source projects. The second project added to the CNCF roster was the Prometheus monitoring effort in May 2016. The OpenTracking project joined the CNCF in October 2016, providing a cloud native approach to application tracing. The fourth project followed in November 2016, with Fluentd coming on board with its log and data collection capabilities. So far in 2017 CNCF has added three new projects to the open-source foundation’s ranks. These include the Linkerd service mesh project added in January, the GRPC remote procedure call (RPC) framework in February and CoreDNS in March.

The Kubernetes project was started by Google and contributed to the CNCF in July 2015. Kubernetes enables users to manage and scale container deployments and includes a host of tools that enable orchestration capabilities.

As organizations deploy Kubernetes into production there is a need for metrics and performance alerts, which is what the Prometheus project aims to provide. Prometheus became part of the CNCF in May 2016.

When it comes to identifying potential performance or stability issues in application code, developers and operators will commonly use some form of ‘tracing’ tool. While there are no shortage of developer tools for tracing, the OpenTracing project that joined the CNCF in October 2016, is designed to be a cloud native approach to tracing.

The Fluentd project <a href=”https://www.eweek.com/cloud/cloud-native-computing-foundation-adds-new-project-grows-membership” target=”_blank”>joined</a> the CNCF in November 2016. Fluentd allows for the implementation of a unified logging layer for cloud native applications.

Inside of a cloud native application deployment there are often multiple services that communicate with each other. The Linkerd project is an open-source service mesh that aims to help improve the reliability of application communications in a cloud native environment.

The gRPC project is another Google-led effort that is now part of the CNCF. The gRPC project is an open source, high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework.

DNS (Domain Name Service) is a core internet networking service that helps to connect IP address to domain names. In a cloud native environment, DNS can be complicated, which is a challenge the CoreDNS project aims to help solve.