What Were All Those Project Names on the KubeCon Europe 2023 Page?

When checking out this year’s KubeCon in Amsterdam, the following text snippet caught my attention:

“Join containerd, CoreDNS, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Rook, TiKV, TUF, Vitess, Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, Chaos Mesh, Cilium, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, CubeFS, dapr, Dragonfly, Emissary Ingress, Falco, Flagger, Flux, gRPC, Hubble, in-toto, KEDA, Keptn, Knativec, KubeEdge, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, SPIFFE, SPIRE, Tetragon, Thanos, and Volcano (…)”

A lot of project names! Some I did know, some which were completely new to me.

“What Is All This?”

It turns out, that those are CNCF Projects which are graduated or currently incubating.

The conference page got updated (2023-01-25) shortly after I stumbled upon it, and now contains the following text (emphasis mine):

Join our CNCF Graduated and Incubating Projects as the community gathers for five days to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing.

Instead of (‘opens python REPL and types furiously’) 55 different project names, the text now simply says “CNCF Graduated and Incubating Projects“. In case you didn’t click, it’s the official CNCF page, listing the biggest projects.

Note: I didn’t find this page back then, for better of worse. It’s a decent overview of course, with 1-4 (yes, I counted) words about each project!

While keeping up with Kubernetes was, and still is a full-time job, I like to make sure that I have at least an overview of all the parts that I don’t use day-to-day. It can’t hurt to spend some time and…

Dive Deeper

If you want to familiarize yourself with all of those projects, the CNCF page offers an interactive page to filter and browse all graduated projects and more if you adjust the filters.

There are also cool and large infographics, conveying an overview of those projects (and, once again, more) in a single image. Take this one for example.

If you want a mix of the infographic view and the filtered card, the main page is the place you should check out.

It’s fun to look over it, and try to spot some more obscure entries.

A much beloved project I spotted right away in that graphic is kube-rs for example – “it’s in “Orchestration & Management”, below Volcano.

Note: kube-rs is a Rust crate, which provides a way to communicate with the Kubernetes API. It’s at the core of all of our operators here at Stackable.

All of those ways to get more information are fine, but I like to compile info for later use. So I took some time to make my own humble overview in a familiar format.

An Overview Of All Mentioned Projects

I’m a firm believer in sharing intermediate work, and curiosity-driven research whenever possible.

While it’s an option to go to the official CNCF page and click each project to get what it’s about, I enjoy browsing around and only investigating what sparks my interest.

Here’s a compiled list of every project, with a small blurb of text from each page and a link to their site or GitHub page. The chosen text snippets are simply the first concise thing I spotted on those pages. I hope this list can invite you to browse and maybe click a link or two of your choice. All text blurbs are quoted and unchanged because there are 55 of them, holy moly.

containerd – “An industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability”
CoreDNS – “CoreDNS: DNS and Service Discovery”
Envoy – “ENVOY IS AN OPEN SOURCE EDGE AND SERVICE PROXY, DESIGNED FOR CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS”
etcd – “A distributed, reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system”
Fluentd – “Build Your Unified Logging Layer”
Harbor – “our mission is to be the trusted cloud native repository for Kubernetes”
Helm – “The package manager for Kubernetes”
Jaeger – “Jaeger: open source, end-to-end distributed tracing”
Kubernetes – “Production-Grade Container Orchestration”
Linkerd – “A different kind of service mesh”
Open Policy Agent – “Policy-based control for cloud native environments”
Prometheus – “From metrics to insight”
Rook – “Open-Source, Cloud-Native Storage for Kubernetes”
TiKV – “TiKV is a highly scalable, low latency, and easy to use key-value database.”
TUF – “A framework for securing software update systems”
Vitess – “Scalable. Reliable. MySQL-compatible. Cloud-native. Database.”
Argo – “Open source tools for Kubernetes to run workflows, manage clusters, and do GitOps right.”
Backstage – “An open platform for building developer portals”
Buildpacks – “Cloud Native Buildpacks transform your application source code into images that can run on any cloud.”
Chaos Mesh – “A Powerful Chaos Engineering Platform for Kubernetes”
Cilium – “eBPF-based Networking, Observability, Security”
CloudEvents – “A specification for describing event data in a common way”
CNI – “The Container Network Interface”
Contour – “High performance ingress controller for Kubernetes”
Cortex – “Horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term storage for Prometheus.”
CRI-O – “LIGHTWEIGHT CONTAINER RUNTIME FOR KUBERNETES”
Crossplane – “The cloud native control plane framework”
CubeFS – “CubeFS is a cloud native distributed storage platform.”
dapr – “APIs for building portable and reliable microservices”
Dragonfly – “Provide efficient, stable, secure, low-costfile and image distribution services to be the best practice and standard solution in cloud native architectures.”
Emissary Ingress – “Open Source API Gateway”
Falco – “Cloud-Native Runtime Security”
Flagger – “Progressive Delivery Operator for Kubernetes”
Flux – “Flux provides GitOps for both apps and infrastructure”
gRPC – “A high performance, open source universal RPC framework”
Hubble – “Network, Service & Security Observability for Kubernetes using eBPF”
in-toto – “A framework to secure the integrity of software supply chains”
KEDA – “Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling”
Keptn – “Cloud-native application life-cycle orchestration”
Knativec – “Open-Source Enterprise-level solution to build Serverless and Event Driven Applications”
KubeEdge – “Kubernetes Native Edge Computing Framework”
KubeVirt – “Building a virtualization API for Kubernetes”
Kyverno – “Kubernetes Native Policy Management”
Litmus – “Open Source Chaos Engineering platform”
Longhorn – “Cloud native distributed block storage for Kubernetes”
NATS – “Connective Technology for Adaptive Edge & Distributed Systems”
Notary – “Notary is a project that allows anyone to have trust over arbitrary collections of data”
OpenMetrics – “specifies the de-facto standard for transmitting cloud-native metrics at scale, with support for both text representation and Protocol Buffers.”
OpenTelemetry – “High-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability”
Operator Framework – “an open source toolkit to manage Kubernetes native applications, called Operators, in an effective, automated, and scalable way.”
SPIFFE – “A universal identity control plane for distributed systems”
SPIRE – “The SPIFFE Runtime Environment”
Tetragon – “eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement”
Thanos – “Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.”
Volcano – “Cloud native batch scheduling system for compute-intensive workloads”

That’s as Deep as We Will Go

Just listing out those 55 projects results in a pretty long list. And those entries are only the most visible and prominent ones.

The kube-rs project mentioned above for example, is not on that list. It is merely a CNCF Sandbox project, but it’s essential for working with k8s from Rust and at the core of day-to-day development here at Stackable. Imagine how much more activity happens around Kubernetes, which most people will not have the time or energy to explore.

I hope that this brief exploration has been useful to you, and that you have discovered one or two projects which you haven’t known about so far.