New CNCF Sandbox Projects

By Andy Shi

On June 24th, 2020, the CNCF TOC board voted to admit several new projects into the Sandbox family. There are three stages defined by CNCF based on maturity of a project: Sandbox, Incubation and Graduation. Sandbox is the beginning and probation stage of an open source project. Projects entering Sandbox cannot claim themselves to be "CNCF Project" yet.

In the past, it was quite hard to be admitted into Sandbox. Recently, things have changed. The CNCF TOC has decided to lower the barrier to enter Sandbox while raising the bar at Incubation. As a result, we see many projects swamp into CNCF Sandbox.

The newly admitted projects are quite diverse in cloud native landscaping and are focusing on production use cases. Here are a few examples:

Crossplane manages infrastructure for your platform. It is the official implementation of OAM (open application model). The major advantage of Crossplane over other infrastructure provision projects such as Terraform is that Crossplane enables workload portability across different cloud providers. I.e., you are able to provision a resource on Azure and access it from Alibaba Cloud.

Kuma is yet another service mesh project by Kong. To be more specific, it is the control plane of service mesh. It's a light weight service mesh like Linkerd. Unlike Linkerd, the data plane is Envoy, the same as Istio. Kuma can work on both Kubernetes and VMs, which reminds people of the AWS App Mesh.

Dex also enters very crowded CNCF area: security. The projects already in the same landscape include ORY Hydra, Keycloak and Gluu, etc. Dex is relatively lightweight. It doesn't support username/passwords authentication but does federated logins pretty well. It focuses on using OpenID to authenticate on Kubernetes.

Cloud Custodian is a stateless rules engine for cloud audit, management, and governance. It is sponsored by Capital One. Cloud Custodian started as an AWS resource management tool. Now it has grown into a federated management tool across different cloud vendors.

There are two networking projects getting into the Sandbox. BFE is an open-source layer 7 load balancer derived from proprietary Baidu FrontEnd. The competition in this section includes Nginx, Envoy and Traefik. Another project is CNI-Genie. It is a multi-networking plugin for Kubernetes. CNI-Genie allows user to decide which CNI implementation to use at run time instead of cluster creation time.

There are a few other projects not covered here. It's quite exciting to see so many projects joining CNCF Sandbox as well as the maturity of Cloud native adoption.

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The views expressed herein are for reference only and don't necessarily represent the official views of Alibaba Cloud.

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