The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Karmada as a CNCF incubating project.
Karmada is a Kubernetes management system that enables users to run cloud native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds with no changes to applications. By integrating with Kubernetes-native APIs and providing advanced scheduling capabilities, Karmada enables open, multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes.
Karmada was jointly initiated by multiple organizations, including First Automobile Works, Huawei Cloud, ICBC, SPD Bank, Qutoutiao.com, VIPKid.com, and xiaohongshu.com in 2021 and was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in September of that year. The project now has more than 500 contributors from 60+ organizations across 20+ countries and regions. There are 70 project members, including 7 maintainers and 23 approvers and reviewers from 15 organizations. It also has 23 public adopters using Karmada in production environments, including Daocloud, Trip.com Group, Vivo, and more.
“Karmada has received widespread attention and support since its inception and now helps more and more end users to efficiently manage Kubernetes clusters and distributed applications in multi-cloud environments,” said Kevin Wang, Founder and Maintainer of Karmada project. “We are thrilled that Karmada has reached CNCF incubating status and will continue to work on developing a global community as well as making the project more robust.”
“Karmada fills gaps in several areas around scheduling and orchestration for multi-cloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, which can provide better performance and lower costs for distributed organizations,” said Nikhita Raghunath, TOC Sponsor for Karmada’s move to incubation. “Since joining the CNCF Sandbox, the project team has worked tirelessly to add new features and capabilities and to build integrations with the greater cloud native ecosystem. We look forward to seeing the project’s continued growth.”
Main Components:
- karmada-apiserver exposes the Karmada API in addition to Kubernetes.
- karmada-scheduler is responsible for scheduling resources to clusters.
- karmada-controller-manager runs various custom controller processes.
- etcd is used as a backing store for API resources.
- karmada-agent takes responsibility for a specific cluster by syncing configurations from the control plane.
Notable Milestones:
- 3,600+ GitHub Stars
- 3,500+pull requests
- 1,400+issues
- 540+ contributors
- 60+Releases
- 20+ production users
As a CNCF incubating project, Karmada continues to plan a project roadmap and is actively adding new features and functionality, including:
- Multi-cluster security to minimize the permissions of the control plane and reduce blast radius to member clusters after a control plane failure.
- Larger scale landing to continue to reduce the access latency, resources consumed, and stability impact on the system under high concurrency.
- Multi-cluster observability, monitoring, and logging.
- Multi-cluster application distribution to simplify deployment, plug-in installation, and lifecycle management.
- Deeper integration with the cloud native ecosystem.
As a CNCF-hosted project, Karmada 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. Karmada joins more than 30 other incubating projects. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.
Supporting End User and Partner Quotes
“Huawei Cloud is committed to developing cloud native technologies, industries, and ecosystems,” said Bruno Zhang, CTO at Huawei Cloud. “Karmada originated from the deep accumulation of the community and Huawei Cloud in the field of multi-cloud management, providing enterprises with a smooth evolution solution from single cluster to distributed cloud architecture. As one of the initiators and main contributors of the Karmada project, Huawei Cloud will continue to cooperate with CNCF and the community to unleash the ubiquitous value of cloud native.”
“Karmada provides a seamless infrastructure for multi-cloud strategies,” said Kai Yan, Co-founder and Chief Architect at DaoCloud. “With its neutral and vendor-independent design, users can easily connect and switch between clouds and hybrid clouds at low cost. It offers convenient solutions for cross-cluster microservices orchestration, scalable capability across clusters, multi-cloud access, and disaster recovery.”
“Karmada allows us to provide multi-cluster architectures to Zendesk’s internal engineering teams while maintaining a single point of access for authentication, configuration delivery and service management,” said Adam Minasian, Engineering Manager of the Compute team at Zendesk. “We are excited to continue to work with the Karmada project as it enters incubation status with CNCF.
“Whether it is out of concerns about vendor lock-in or the need for rapid business expansion, a hybrid multi-cloud has become a realistic choice for Trip.com,” said Honghui Yue, Director of Trip.com Container & Hybrid Cloud team at Trip.com Group. “Karmada, with its standard Kubernetes API compatibility, principle of separating concerns, and active community, has helped us build a control plane for a hybrid multi-cloud, reducing the cost of architecture migration and the complexity of managing heterogeneous environments. At the same time, Trip.com’s successful recovery in the tourism industry has also been aided by the fault isolation architecture and multi-cluster HPA implemented with Karmada.”
“Karmada simplifies cluster and application delivery and management in a multi-cluster environment, enabling resource coordination across clusters to enhance application availability and resilience. It ensures stable, efficient, and controlled application deployment and updates,” said He Li, Expert Engineer at Shopee.
“Karmada, as an open-source multi-cloud container orchestration platform, provides flexibility and reliable cross-platform, cross-region, and cross-cloud resource management for cloud-native middleware, laying the foundation for high availability of middleware across cities and data centers,” said Xiangyong Meng, Senior Software Engineer at Netease.