The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which seeks to drive large-scale cloud computing with an emphasis on containers and microservices, has just added the Container Network Interface (CNI) project to its fold.
The project joins others hosted by the nonprofit foundation, including the Kuberrnetes container orchestration platform and CoreDNS DNS server. CNI had been a GitHub open source project. It features a specification and libraries to write plugins for configuring networking interfaces in Linux containers.
The foundation’s adoption of CNI is meant to increase its focus on network connectivity of containers and the removal of allocated sources when the container is deleted. “The idea [is] that CNI is a standard way of being able to use different networking technologies,” said Dan Kohn, the foundation’s executive director.
Although there have been 17 releases of CNI, it has yet to reach a 1.0 status. Moving it to the foundation will reap benefits in documentation, oversight, and governance, said Ken Owens, cloud CTO at Cisco Systems, who has participated in CNI’s development. Other participants in CNI’s development have included Apache Mesos, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, and Red Hat OpenShift.
Seven related projects hosted by the CNCF are:
- Containerd, a core container runtime, available as a daemon for Linux and Windows and intended for embedding into a larger system.
- Fluentd, a data collector for a unified logging layer, for better understanding of data.
- Linkerd, a transparent proxy adding a service directory, routing, failure handling and visibility to applications.
- gRPC, a universal remote-procedure-call framework.
- RKT, a CLI for running application containers in Linux.
- OpenTracing, providing a standard for distributed tracing.
- Prometheus, a monitoring and alerting toolkit.