Fluid Becomes a CNCF Incubating Project

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee has voted to accept Fluid as a CNCF incubating project. Fluid is a cloud native data orchestration and acceleration system originally created by Nanjing University, Alibaba Cloud, and the Alluxio community. It treats 'elastic datasets' as a first-class Kubernetes resource, adding a data abstraction layer that supports dataset versioning, caching, dynamic mounting, and access controls for data-intensive AI and big data workloads. Key components include a Dataset Controller, Application Scheduler, Runtime Plugins (supporting Alluxio, JuiceFS, Vineyard), a Webhook for zero-intrusion pod injection, and a CSI Plugin. Fluid has been adopted by major companies including Xiaomi, Alibaba, NetEase, and Bilibili, and was listed as 'Adopt' in the CNCF 2024 Technology Landscape Radar. The project has 1.9k GitHub stars and 979 contributors. Future plans include evolving into an intelligent elastic data platform targeting GenAI workloads.