CNCF Adds Oracle, Onboards the Envoy and Jaeger Projects
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation continues to gain momentum, signing on as a sponsor one of the most venerable enterprise software companies, Oracle, and adding two more cloud-native projects to its portfolio, the Envoy service mesh and the Jaeger microservice debugging software.
The CNCF announced the new inclusions at the Open Source Summit North America, being held this week in Los Angeles.
“The last decade was about virtualization, and this decade is about containerization and cloud-native. You containerize, and that allows you to split the app into lots of pieces — microservices — and then you orchestrate all those pieces,” said CNCF Executive Director Dan Kohn. “We think that’s really the biggest trend in computing.”
CNCF has already signed on as sponsors the five largest cloud purveyors, AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba.
By joining CNCF, Oracle is showing an interest in adopting cloud-native architecture for its own considerable user-base. Oracle has found that its customers are already using a number of CNCF technologies, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC and OpenTracing.
Oracle has also released a Terraform-based Kubernetes Installer for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service, as well as the Oracle Linux Container Services for Kubernetes, a package designed to simplify the configuration and setup of CNCF’s open source container orchestration engine.
New Projects
Envoy and Jaeger are the 11th and 12th projects, respectively, accepted by the CNCF.
Written in C++ for performance reasons, Envoy is an API-driven service mesh, a platform for multiple services to find and communicate with one another. The software was originally built at Lyft, and released as open source in September. Google and IBM have both contributed heavily to the project (in fact, Google has more coders on Envoy than Lyft itself).
While Kubernetes provides out-of-the-box job orchestration, Envoy supplies and manages external connectivity across different services. “A service mesh is about giving you a whole additional set of capabilities on top of the clustering environment,” Kohn explained.
The CNCF has also accepted the Jaeger, a tracing application for distributed applications developed by Uber. This software was inspired by the Google Dapper paper, and builds from the Zipken project, using the OpenTracing standard. Currently, Uber uses Jaeger to manage 1,200 individual microservices, each of which may have multiple instances operating at any given time.
As a microservices debugger, Jaeger can be used to track problems across different services, handy for root cause analysis, service dependency analysis and performance optimization.
Kohn noted the irony that both of these projects sprang from vehicle sharing services (and both applications have to deal with the traffic of a sort, albeit network traffic). At the same time, however, “the thing they have in common is that both of those companies had to build massive web scale infrastructure very quickly over the last few years.”
Other CNCF projects include Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, and the Container Networking Initiative.
TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht contributed to this article.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image: L.A. mural by Chris Lux.
