CNCF issued an announcement stating that etcd has successfully graduated. From incubation to graduation, etcd has been adopted by more and more people, has an open governance process, characteristic maturity, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability and inclusiveness.
etcd is a distributed and reliable key-value store, which provides a reliable way to store data that needs to be accessed by distributed systems or machine clusters. Any complex application, from simple web applications to Kubernetes, can read data from etcd and write data to it. The project was created in CoreOS in 2013 and joined CNCF as an incubation project in December 2018.
CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk said that the etcd project is a key component of Kubernetes, and many other projects rely on etcd to achieve reliable distributed data storage. They also said that they were deeply impressed by etcd's continued scale of milestones and the mature handling of recent security audits, and they look forward to cultivating communities as a graduate project.
Currently, etcd has been used in production by many companies, including Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Cisco, EMC, Google, Huawei, IBM, Red Hat, Uber, Verizon, etc., as well as projects such as Kubernetes, CoreDNS, M3, Rook, and TiKV.
The maintainer team currently consists of 10 members and represents well-distributed companies, including Alibaba, Amazon, Cockroach Labs, Google Cloud, IBM, and Red Hat. Since etcd became an incubation project, three new maintainers have been added. In the past 12 months, 200 different contributors have written pull requests.
The third-party security audit sponsored by CNCF was conducted on the latest major release of etcd v3.4 through Trail of Bits in July 2020. According to the report, the etcd code base is a mature and widely adopted product, and no obvious problems have been found in the core components of etcd. A serious problem was discovered in the etcd gateway, but the team has resolved the problem through fixes and backports to etcd supported versions.
The project also passed the Jepsen test in January 2020, which analyzes open source distributed systems to check whether they achieve consistency guarantees. The results show the maturity of the project function. The Jepsen team also pointed out some areas for improvement, which were implemented by the etcd team.
In order to officially graduate from the incubation stage, the project obtained the CII Best Practice badge certification, completed a security audit and resolved vulnerabilities, defined its own governance, and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct.