DEVOPSdigest

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of CubeFS.

CubeFS is an open source distributed storage system that supports access protocols such as POSIX, HDFS, S3, and its own REST API. It can be used in many scenarios, including big data, AI/LLMs, container platforms, separation of storage and computing for databases and middleware, data sharing, and more. Key features of CubeFS include a highly scalable metadata service with strong consistency and multi-tenancy support for better resource utilization and tenant isolation.

The CubeFS project was founded in 2017 at JD.com. It was accepted to the CNCF Sandbox in December 2019 and moved to the Incubator in 2022. Since joining CNCF, adopters have grown by 1,900%, from 10 to 200. Contributions have grown by 1,415%, from 1,112 to 16,845, and the number of contributors has grown by 1,300%, from 27 individuals across five companies to 379 across 42 companies.

Adopters have been using CubeFS in the production environment for many years, managing hundreds of petabytes of data and supporting access to hundreds of thousands of clients. The total storage size of major adopters is estimated to reach 350 petabytes by the beginning of 2025. The project has been adopted across fields like commerce, cloud storage, and online media streaming. It is also used by organizations like JD.com, OPPO, NetEase, and more.

“Large-scale organizations like OPPO are already turning to CubeFS to run machine learning platforms in production and using AI training,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “The stability, reliable performance, and active community of CubeFS have built the trust of adopters, and we look forward to seeing how adoption develops as AI and ML continue to drive the growth of data.”

“Having worked with CNCF through other projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, I know it is the ideal home for open source cloud native projects,” said Haifeng Liu, CubeFS creator and maintainer. “We look forward to making CubeFS the best open source unstructured data storage service for enterprises across both private and public cloud services.”

The project roadmap for 2025 includes main tasks such as adding or upgrading metadata service cost optimization, tiered storage, and distributed cache acceleration while planning to add call chain tracing to improve issue-tracking capabilities.

To officially graduate, the project improved its governance and code of conduct and completed a security audit. This included analyzing and creating a threat model for risk and entry points, an SLSA review of supply-chain security, and a code review for security health and vulnerabilities.