Red Hat donates ETCD project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Red Hat contributes etcd project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is one of the most important open-source projects for cloud environments.

CNCF is a vendor-neutral foundation under The Linux Foundation to drive the adoption of cloud-native systems and home for twenty plus fastest-growing projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy.

Red Hat acquired ETCD with the acquisition of CoreOS Inc. in last January 2018.

The etcd (pronounced et-see-dee) is an open source, distributed and consistent key-value store for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination in Kubernetes clusters including Red Hat OpenShift. It uses Raft consensus algorithm for replicated logs. Kubernetes is becoming a de-facto standard among cloud vendors to manage cloud environments with containers and etcd works as a preferred store to ensure cluster data is backed up in case of cluster downtime. The current etcd release is 3.3 with total 157 releases, nearly 15,000 commits, and 469 contributors.

The project has a large community of users including contributors from Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Red Hat. Uber and Alibaba use etcd for their critical systems for the number of years.

Chief Operating Officer, CNCF, Chris Aniszczyk, “Kubernetes and the cloud-native community has been building upon on etcd since the early days of containers. Today, the etcd project is widely adopted and we look forward to working with the project maintainers from Alibaba, AWS, Google, and Red Hat, alongside the wider community to cultivate and sustain the incubating project,”

Considering the recent acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, there were doubts about the slowdown in contributions towards opensource projects maintained by Red Hat. Now etcd is accepted into CNCF, it reaffirms confidence into the etcd project which already forms the backbone of many production users and projects.