Posted on April 7, 2022

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Volcano as a CNCF incubating project. 

Volcano is a cloud native batch system and CNCF’s first batch computing project. It is developed to extend cloud native from micro services to big data, artificial intelligence, and HPC by providing the following capabilities:

The project was created in March 2019 and was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in April 2020. Since joining the Sandbox, the number of contributors has increased from 70+ to 350+ individuals and from 5 to more than 50 organizations, including Amazon, HP, Huawei, Google, Oracle, and others.

“Volcano has helped users across industries, including academia, finance, software, and transportation, transition their AI/ML, big data, and HPC workloads from legacy environments to cloud native infrastructures,” said Kevin Wang, Volcano co-founder. “We are very excited to continue to make the project more robust as it moves to incubation.”

Volcano has been adopted in production by more than 30 organizations, nearly two-thirds of which are well-known Chinese and global internet companies, including Baidu, Tencent, IQIYI, and Xiaohongshu. 

The first production-ready version, v1.0, was released in 2020, which added advanced scheduling algorithms and integration with most mainstream computing platforms. Volcano falls under the CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) Runtime and aligns and integrates with other CNCF projects like Argo, gRPC, KubeEdge, Prometheus, and others. 

“I’m incredibly proud to see Volcano help more and more end-users run high-performance workloads in cloud native environments,” said Klaus Ma, Volcano co-founder. “Becoming a CNCF incubating project will assure the project’s independent future and encourage additional companies to adopt and contribute to the project, and I’m looking forward to this continued growth across the globe.”

Main Components:

Notable Milestones:

“Batch processing helps ease the deployment of complicated workloads in Kubernetes, which is especially important for growing fields like AI and Big Data,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Streamlining the processing of large volumes of data in a cloud native fashion provides valuable insights, and tools like Volcano are helping to make Kubernetes a world class tool for industries like scientific research, high performance computing and more.”

In the future, the Volcano team will extend and support more batch scenarios such as elastic training, multi-cluster-scheduling, fine grained resource management, DAG scheduling, performance optimization. You can read about more planned features in the roadmap.

To learn more about Volcano, watch recent sessions from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2021 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2021. You can also join the Slack workspace and follow the project on Twitter.

As a CNCF-hosted project, Volcano is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. Volcano joins incubating technologies Argo, Backstage, Buildpacks, ChaosMesh, Cilium, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, Dapr, Dragonfly, emissary-ingress, Falco, Flagger, Flux, gRPC, in-toto, KEDA, Knative, KubeEdge, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.