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Since its founding in 2015, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has become one of the most important movers and shakers in the open source ecosystem—especially when it comes to tools that affect containers and other “cloud-native” technologies. CNCF was established to promote and organize projects related to large-scale industry trends towards containerization, orchestration, and microservices architectures. In the time since, 10 open source projects have been added to the foundation. Even if you have never heard of the CNCF, in all likelihood you have heard of one of its more popular projects: the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. But the CNCF is about much more than Kubernetes. Here’s a look at some other vital projects within the CNCF ecosystem that are worth following if you want to stay abreast of important developments in the container and cloud computing world.
Compare architectures, feature sets, and usability of Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. Download now The first is Linkerd, a solution for meshing service-based apps that run in the cloud. The idea behind Linkerd is this: Microservices are great, but only if you have a good way to connect them in order to form complete apps. If you don’t, your microservices apps end up as a clunky mess of moving parts that just don’t fit together well. Linkerd is an open source project that aims to solve this challenge by providing what the developers call a \“service mesh.\” Linkerd’s service mesh provides a convenient and reliable interface over which different services can interact. In addition to making progammers’ lives easier by providing a simple way and consistent abstraction layer for connect services, linkerd is designed with scalability, high availability and security in mind. The project, which is overseen by Buoyant, joined the CNCF in early 2017.
Metrics are only one aspect of the microservices application visibility puzzle. Centralized logging is another. As the number of applications and the size of a company grows (especially as more and more services are containerized), collecting, analyzing, and querying structured logs in one location is vital. This is where Fluentd comes in. Fluentd is a log collector (comparable to LogStash) through which logs can be filtered, sanitized, and routed to a variety of destinations. Like other log collectors, Fluentd can be used with a variety of core and third-party input and output plugins (such as the Elasticsearch plugin, S3 plugin, etc). Fluentd also has some level of in-memory storage, and reliability. A very simplified example of how Fluentd might be utilized is the routing of logs from rsyslog from a variety of hosts to Fluentd and then to an Elasticsearch cluster.
The third piece of the observability pie is distributed tracing. As monolith applications are broken down into a variety of smaller services, more and more data is being transmitted from frontend to backend, service to service, and naturally, within services. But what happens when a public-facing application with a variety of dependencies experiences sudden latency? This is where distributed tracing comes in. At its core, tracing refers to propagating metadata through different request calls, threads, and processes, and ultimately, constructing a graph based upon this metadata. OpenTracing is a tracing standard that was created as a response to a long-running problem in the field of distributed tracing—namely, how can one reconcile instrumenting tracing when a company’s stack may consist of a multitude of third-party software, operating systems, and custom applications, all in different languages? OpenTracing, a standardized tracing, is the solution. The project provides standardization of instrumentation APIs for span (i.e. timed operation) management and inter-process propagation. As a result, users can easily switch out tracing libraries or centralized tracing systems (such as Zipkin, Dapper, etc.) with minimal configuration and headache.
Thus far we have discovered how one might deploy, schedule, and gain insight into microservices in the cloud. But what about the mode of communication between them? Enter remote procedure calls. The concept of remote procedure calls has been around for some time now, and refers to a pattern where functions are called as though they are remote—often used in systems with a greater focus on actions rather than the CRUD model of RESTful services. gRPC, however, refers to Google’s implementation of remote procedure calls that leverages http/2 and protocol buffers. Compared to JSON-based RPC, gRPC has been proven to be orders of magnitude faster, making it an excellent choice for large-scale distributed platforms. In fact, both etcd (the popular key-value store from CoreOS) and Google’s own BigTable leverage gRPC!
The last project to be included on this list isrkt (also known as Rocket), a container runtime. Although Docker’s containerd runtime was arguably the container runtime that popularized the concept of containers, and Docker remains a commonly used runtime within the orchestration ecosystem, rkt is becoming more and more popular as of late. The differences between the two are quite apparent. While Docker has chosen to package in Swarm and consists of a daemon and an executable communicating with the daemon via a REST API, rkt is far simpler. It consists of a simple command line tool that, when given an image, a specification format, and an image discovery mechanism, will run a container. With rkt, users avoid issues like stale containers when configuring their container runtime with something such as systemd. Furthermore, rkt is able to run not only images in the App Container format, but also standard Docker images.
As we move further into this brave new world of microservice architecture, more and more open source projects are being developed for those who truly wish to go cloud-native. This list covered just some of the important CNCF projects worth following. I urge you to look into the others. Sneha Inguva is an enthusiastic software engineer currently working on building developer tooling at DigitalOcean. She has worked at a variety of startups in the last few years, and has a unique perspective on building and deploying software in eclectic verticals (education, 3D printing, and casinos, to name a few). When she isn’t bashing away on a project or reading about the latest emerging technology, she is busy rescuing animals or practicing martial arts.