Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces etcd Graduation

Widely Used Data Store Solution for Orchestrators Has Seen 200 Distinct Contributors in the Past 12 Months

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of etcd. To move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation etcd has demonstrated growing adoption, an open governance process, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability, and inclusivity.

etcd is a distributed, reliable key-value store and provides a reliable way to store data that needs to be accessed by a distributed system or cluster of machines. Applications of any complexity, from a simple web app to Kubernetes, can read data from and write data into etcd. The project was created at CoreOS in 2013 and joined CNCF in December 2018 as an incubating project.

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“The etcd project is a key component inside Kubernetes along with many other projects that depend on etcd for reliable distributed data storage,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We remain impressed by the milestones that etcd continues to reach in scale and mature handling of its recent security audit, we look forward to cultivating its community as a graduated project.”

etcd is used in production by many companies, including Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Cisco, EMC, Google, Huawei, IBM, Red Hat, Uber, Verizon, and more, and projects including Kubernetes, CoreDNS, M3, Rook, and TiKV.

“Having etcd as our meta-store in Placement Driver and our inspiration for Raft implementation in production has proven to be a great choice for TiKV and TiDB, ensuring data consistency and high availability across TiDB clusters,” said Ed Huang, co-founder and CTO at PingCAP. “We are proud and glad to be part of its graduation journey, and we’d love to be involved in its ecosystem development more in the future.”

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The maintainer team currently consists of 10 members, with a healthy distribution of corporations represented, including Alibaba, Amazon, Cockroach Labs, Google Cloud, IBM, Indeed, and Red Hat. Three new maintainers have been added since etcd became an incubating project. Over the last 12 months, 200 distinct contributors have authored pull requests.

“After seven years of development, etcd has reached maturity and become the cornerstone of many distributed systems. The most important decision for its success was joining the CNCF community and growing its maintainers across many organizations,” said Xiang, etcd maintainer, CNCT TOC member, and engineering director at Alibaba Cloud. “We are excited to see its graduation at CNCF. etcd is the centerpiece powering the container service and many other critical services at Alibaba Cloud. We are looking forward to improving its stability, reliability, and performance with the community in the future.”

A third-party security audit sponsored by CNCF was performed in July 2020 for the latest major release of etcd, v3.4 by Trail of Bits. According to the report, the etcd codebase represents a mature and heavily adopted product, and there were no significant issues found in the core components of etcd. One high severity issue was found in the etcd gateway, which the team addressed with fixes and backported into etcd supported releases.

The project also went through Jepsen testing, which analyzes open source distributed systems to check if they fulfill their consistency guarantees, in January 2020. The results showed maturity in the project functionality. The Jepsen team also pointed out a few areas for improvements, which were implemented by the etcd team.

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“From the beginning, etcd was designed to ease consensus store operations, making it attractive for use with container orchestration systems like Kubernetes. etcd’s selection as the control plane storage for Kubernetes proved a great fit, and two projects have grown and matured together,” said Joe Betz, etcd maintainer and software engineer at Google Cloud. “We are excited to see etcd’s dedication toward reliability, scalability, and quality recognized by the CNCF with this graduation. Today’s announcement is a testament to the maturity of etcd and its readiness for production workloads.”

“Today’s major milestone of the graduation of etcd, could not have been accomplished without the work of the community and the support from the CNCF,” said Sahdev Zala, senior software engineer, open technology, IBM and etcd maintainer. “etcd is playing a critical role providing a distributed key-value store that is highly available and meets the strong consistency requirements demanded by large scale Kubernetes clusters.”

“Open source software powers our lives in so many ways,” said Bob Wise, General Manager of Kubernetes at AWS. “From Linux to Kubernetes, open communities of builders from all sizes of organizations and walks of life spend considerable time creating and maintaining projects that underpin much of the internet, telecommunications, finance, transportation, gaming, retail, and healthcare systems we use every day.  etcd is one of these critical projects, and we’re proud to have etcd as a core part of Amazon EKS and to be involved in helping the project grow and thrive. We are fervent supporters of etcd’s graduation and look forward to collaborating with etcd and other Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects to build secure, reliable, powerful, and scalable open source software.”

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