TiKV is now the latest project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an initiative that’s meant to help advance Kubernetes and other container technologies.

TiKV is an open-source distributed transactional key-value database that’s optimized for stateful applications running in software containers, which are used to host the components of modern apps that can run in any computer environment.

Built in the Rust programming language, the database is designed to serve as a unifying, distributed storage layer for applications that need data persistence, horizontal scalability, high availability, strong consistency and the ability to perform distributed transactions. As such, TiKV’s backers say, it’s an ideal database for next-generation, cloud-native applications.

They note that it was designed from the ground up to be cloud native, and it integrates well with existing CNCF technologies. For example, it uses the Prometheus monitoring system for metrics reporting, and the gRPC framework, which is an open-source remote procedure call system initially developed at Google, for communications. TiKV can also be deployed atop Kubernetes, which is used to orchestrate large deployments of software containers, for ease of installation, upgrades and maintenance.

The TiKV database was created by the founders of PingCAP Inc. to serve as the storage backend for its TiDB database. It was accepted as a CNCF member project at the Sandbox level in August 2018 before graduating to incubating project status in April 2019.

TiKV’s graduation means that it has demonstrated growing adoption, an open governance process, feature maturity and a strong commitment to community, sustainability and inclusivity, the CNCF said.

“TiKV was one of our first Rust based projects and is truly a flexible and extensible cloud native key-value store,” said Chris Aniszczyk, the CNCF’s chief technology officer and chief operating officer. “Since the project joined CNCF, we have been impressed with the project growth and desire to cultivate a global open source community.”

TiKV has certainly grown in popularity, and it’s now used in production by more than 1,000 companies across multiple industries, the CNCF said. It’s particularly popular with Chinese enterprises, with companies including Yidian Wangju Technology Co., Ltd., JD Cloud and Zhihu all acting as official maintainers of the project.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that TiKV’s graduation makes yet another statement about the speed of innovation in open-source software.

“TiKV is a key software layer that can aid enterprises that need storage persistence with their modern workloads and next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “As with all open-source technologies, early adoption and community uptake are the key metrics for developers and executives to follow.”

Image: TiKV