Red Hat plans to announce Tuesday that it will donate an important tool that helps ensure Kubernetes clusters run reliably to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, hosts of KubeCon 2018 in Seattle.
A key part of its acquisition of CoreOS last year for $250 million, etcd, a key-value store for Kubernetes clusters, will join the CNCF as an incubation-level project. Etcd is used with every cluster running Kubernetes, which has emerged as the preferred way to manage large numbers of containers, to ensure important data is backed up and available should one cluster crash.
It was originally developed by CoreOS in 2013 and has been maintained by engineers there and at Red Hat following last year’s deal. Moving it into the CNCF will allow the project to enjoy technical and financial support from a wide variety of companies, and removes any lingering stigma associated with a vendor-driven open-source project.
The move comes as Red Hat awaits the close of its own historic $34 billion deal with IBM to become part of the original American tech company. The project will continue to be an important part of Red Hat’s OpenShift container-management software, the company said, but in the same way that any other open-source project would form the basis of a commercial service.
The CNCF, which organizes support for a variety of open-source projects that advance the state of cloud computing, now has 20 projects at the incubation or graduation level, which implies a certain level of adoption by companies in their production systems.