The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has accepted Dragonfly as an incubation-level hosted project. Dragonfly, which was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in October 2018, is an open source, cloud native image and file distribution system. The goal of Dragonfly is to tackle distribution problems in cloud native scenarios.

• Dragonfly was created in June 2015 by Alibaba Cloud to improve the user experience of image and file distribution in Kubernetes. This allows engineers in enterprises to focus on the application itself rather than infrastructure management.
• The project comprises three main components: supernode plays the role of central scheduler and controls all distribution procedure among the peer network; dfget resides on each peer as an agent to download file pieces; and “dfdaemon” plays the role of proxy which intercepts image downloading requests from container engine to dfget.
• In its latest version, Dragonfly 1.0.0, the project has been completely rewritten in Golang to improve ease of use with other cloud native technologies.
• Dragonfly integrates with other CNCF projects, including Prometheus, containerd, Habor, Kubernetes, and Helm. Project maintainers come from Alibaba, ByteDance, eBay, and Meitu, and there are more than 20 contributing companies, including NetEase, JD.com, Walmart, VMware, Shopee, ChinaMobile, Qunar, ZTE, Qiniu, NVidia, and others.

“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 Sheng Liang, TOC member and project sponsor. “As organizations across the world migrate their workloads onto container stacks, we expect the adoption of Dragonfly to continue to increase significantly.”