Meta:

Stakeholder: @Cory Schwartz

External Partner: Red Hat Emerging Technology

Summary

Develop a kubernetes operator for IPFS and IPFS Cluster.

Kubernetes is the dominant technology for running production services in 2022

A Kubernetes Operator is an automated orchestrator for Kubernetes. Operators help services get up and running quickly and stay running smoothly by automating away the minutia of complex software.

IPFS cluster is a horizontally-scalable IPFS storage solution. It is used to back several storage-heavy services such as nft.storage and web3.storage and has quite a few other known use-cases as well.

Top line goals

1. drive web3 adoption

When a piece of software is easy to use and easy to use and operate, it can be a force multiplier. When software is difficult to use, users will give up frustrated and will be hesitant to try again. One of the goals of this project is to make running an IPFS cluster quick, easy, and familiar.

The completed project will be listed on https://operatorhub.io/ (a popular operator registry) so it can easily adopted.

In modern production k8s environments, Operators are common and well-liked pattern. A system is likely to have a dozen operators already installed to manage everything from monitoring to logging to storage. Wait, did I just say storage? When a production application needs to store a lot of data, it’s easy to get up and running with Redis, or Ceph, or Mongodb. And soon it will be easy to store data on IPFS as well.

2. accelerate PL development velocity

With help from our partners at Weave, we are well on our way to developing a rock-solid operations platform. Infrastructure is code and code is manged with git. Yes, I mean spinning up IPFS clusters to manage any storage workload using highly-automated gitops deployment and CAPI templates.

Don’t spend hours or days waiting for an operations team to spin up and properly configure a cluster for you. Spin up clusters in minutes and be ready to deploy your application in under an hour.

KPIs