The Cloud Native Computing today announced its second incubation-level hosted project this week: Dragonfly, an open-source, cloud-native image and file distribution system for Kubernetes users.

Dragonfly was created in 2015 by engineers at Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The goal was to improve the way images and files are distributed in Kubernetes, which is used to manage clusters of container-based applications that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure.

Dragonfly is made up of three components, including a “supernode” that acts as a central scheduler and controls file and image distribution procedures; “dfget,” which resides on each peer as an agent to download file pieces; and “dfdaemon,” which is a proxy that intercepts image download requests.

One of Dragonfly’s main advantages is that it enables peer-to-peer file distribution, thereby making full use of each peer’s bandwidth resources to speed up downloads. It can support all kinds of container technologies, including Docker containers and Windows containers, and it comes with a passive content delivery network mechanism that helps to avoid repetitive remote downloads.

“Dragonfly improves the user experience by taking advantage of a P2P image and file distribution protocol and easing the network load of the image registry,” said CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member Sheng Liang. “As organizations across the world migrate their workloads onto container stacks, we expect the adoption of Dragonfly to continue to increase significantly.”

Dragonfly has already enjoyed fairly widespread adoption, with the likes of Alibaba, eBay Inc., Nvidia Corp. VMware Inc. and ZTE Corp. among its biggest users.

“Behind the hype and excitement around software containers is the dirty truth that file management can be a major challenge, and Dragonfly addresses that challenge,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller.

The project was recently updated to Dragonfly version 1.0.0, which saw it completely rewritten in Go, a specialized programming language for large, distributed systems and highly scalable network servers. That should help ensure Dragonfly is more interoperable with other cloud native technologies, including CNCF projects such as OpenTracing, gRPC, Linkerd, Helm, Rook, Harbor, etcd and Argo, which was announced earlier this week.

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