Today, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept KubeEdge as an incubation-level hosted project.
KubeEdge is an open source system for extending containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at the edge. It is built on top of Kubernetes and provides infrastructure support for network, application deployment, and metadata synchronization between the cloud and the edge.
“We designed KubeEdge to address three major challenges in edge computing – network reliability between the cloud and edge, resource constraint on edge nodes, and scalability challenges of highly distributed edge architectures,” said Zefeng Wang and Yin Ding, KubeEdge maintainers. “By extending cloud native technologies to the edge, KubeEdge forms a complete edge cloud computing ecosystem. We are very excited to continue to make the project more robust as it moves to incubation.”
KubeEdge was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in March 2019, and released version 1.0 in June 2019. The KubeEdge team now releases quarterly, timed with the release of upstream Kubernetes.
Since joining CNCF, KubeEdge has added more than 395 Contributors from 25 organizations. The project has 14 maintainers from 5 different organizations, including Arm, China Unicom, Huawei, infoblox.com, and inovex.de, and is used in production by Huawei Cloud, KubeSphere, Raisecom, WoCloud, Xinghai IoT, and more.
“KubeEdge solves a complex and unique use case of running containerized applications on edge devices, which benefits the cloud computing ecosystem as a whole,” said Alena Prokharchyk, CNCF TOC member. “Its architecture meets the reliability, availability, and extensibility criteria needed for further growth and adoption. We look forward to seeing new and improved features as the project moves to this new level.”
Main KubeEdge Features:
- Cloud-Edge Reliable Collaboration: Ensure reliable messages delivery without loss over an unstable cloud-edge network.
- Edge Autonomy: Ensure edge nodes run autonomously, and the applications on edge run normally, even when the cloud-edge network is unstable, or the edge is offline and restarted.
- Edge Device Management: Managing edge devices through Kubernetes native APIs implemented by CRD.
- Lightweight Edge Agent: Extremely lightweight Edge Agent (EdgeCore) to run on the resource-constrained edge.
Notable Milestones:
- > 2,500 Commits
- > 2,900 GitHub Stars
- > 780 Forks
KubeEdge is an active participant in the CNCF community and contributes to the upstream Kubernetes project to solve common issues. The project is built on Kubernetes and integrates with other CNCF projects, including containerd and CRI-O as a lightweight container runtime, Prometheus for metrics on the edge, and Envoy for ingress. It also uses gRPC to offer cloud edge remote calls for applications.
The KubeEdge team also collaborated with LF Edge in setting up the Akraino KubeEdge Edge Service Blueprint Family and Akraino Eliot Blueprint Family projects, which can be deployed at enterprise edges or as a cloud edge extension interfacing to the core telco network.
“Kubernetes is the de-facto orchestrator for cloud native services and is starting to evolve in future edge computing deployments,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “KubeEdge plays an important role in bringing Kubernetes to the edge. We look forward to seeing how the project develops and pushes the Kubernetes community into new areas.”
As a CNCF-hosted project, joining incubating technologies Argo, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Dragonfly, etcd, Falco, gRPC, Linkerd, NATS, Notary, OPA, OpenTracing, Operator Framework, Rook, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos, KubeEdge is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.
To learn more about KubeEdge, visit https://kubeedge.io/.