Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds OpenTracing Project

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today officially announced that the open-source OpenTracing project has been accepted as a hosted project.

CNCF got started in July 2015 as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. The inaugural project behind the CNCF is Google’s Kubernetes, which was recently updated to version 1.4.

In May 2016, CNCF welcomed its second project, the Prometheus monitoring project. Now with OpenTracing there is another key tool being added to the CNCF portfolio.

“Consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing and context propagation,” is how OpenTracing defines itself on the group’s Github project page.

It’s an idea that makes sense, though tracing is a well understood concept in Linux that is already part of every major Linux distribution. That said, OpenTracing takes an application or rather a language specific approach, which fits in with the CNCF’s view of the world,that isn’t about operating systems but is about the cloud as a platform for applications.

At the CNCF’s Cloud Native Day in Toronto back in August, Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF commented that the group was looking to add new projects to its roster with possible candidates include the CoreDNS naming project, the Fluental logging effort and the Heron stream processor.

“The idea is, we are trying to support individual projects, and we’re also trying to stitch projects together into a narrative about cloud computing being the best way to deploy cloud applications,” Kohn said at the time.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist