The open-source project Dragonfly, jointly launched by Alibaba Cloud and Ant Group, has officially passed the graduation review of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), becoming one of the cloud-native infrastructure projects deemed stable for production-level environments. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is the world's largest cloud-native open-source organization, and its graduated projects must pass rigorous assessments in stability, security, community governance, and real-world production deployment.
Dragonfly is an open-source image and file distribution system designed for cloud-native environments, primarily addressing efficiency challenges in large-scale image and file distribution centered around Kubernetes. The project originally stemmed from Alibaba Group's internal ultra-large-scale production scenarios, evolving gradually to meet practical demands such as high concurrency and rapid scaling, and has continued to attract external developers and enterprises since being open-sourced.
Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, stated that Dragonfly's graduation reflects its technical maturity and broad industry adoption, highlighting its significant value particularly in image acceleration and data distribution for AI workloads. Since entering the CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2018, the Dragonfly community has consistently expanded.
The number of contributors has grown from an initial 45 individuals from 5 companies to over 270 core contributors from more than 130 organizations today, with cumulative code submissions exceeding 26,000 and a total developer community participation surpassing 1,800 people. Companies including Didi, Kuaishou, Intel, Datadog, and Zhipu AI have integrated and utilized the project in their production environments.
