Dragonfly project has graduated from CNCF, proving its maturity as a high-scale peer-to-peer system for distributing container images and massive AI models across thousands of nodes.

The New Stack is a publication covering trends and technologies in cloud-native development, DevOps, and software delivery. Developers can learn about containerization, Kubernetes, and cloud computing, as well as explore topics such as microservices architecture, serverless computing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

The New Stack

Dragonfly, an open source peer-to-peer file distribution system, has graduated from CNCF after eight years of development. Originally created by Alibaba Cloud, it enables rapid distribution of container images and AI models across thousands of nodes simultaneously using P2P technology. The system reduces network bottlenecks by allowing nodes to share files with each other rather than all downloading from a central server. It integrates with Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus, and supports the ModelPack specification. Major adopters include Alibaba, Ant Group (10,000 nodes), Datadog (reduced startup from 5 minutes to seconds), and DiDi. The Nydus subproject further accelerates distribution by reducing image pull times to near zero.

CNCF Dragonfly Speeds Container, Model Sharing with P2P