What’s the next Cloud Native Computing Foundation project to hit the big time?

The CNCF graduated Kubernetes, but that doesn’t mean the open-source poster child has moved out; it’s moved up to bona fide enterprise readiness. Thanks to growing adoption and support for industry-wide standards, The popular platform for running containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications), has reached a turning point in its maturation.

It looks like Envoy — an edge and service proxy for cloud-native applications (also graduated) — is poised for a growth spurt. It’s ready to roll, and we’re already seeing scads of vertical stuff tumble from it, according to Matt Klein (pictured), software engineer at Lyft Inc. and creator of Envoy.

“I think that what has made the community so successful is that we build this base thing, and it’s amazing — but then we can allow people to add vertical value,” Klein said. This value could come in the form of innovative applications or cloud vendors, he added.

Klein spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed Envoy’s future prospects at the edge, in mobile phones, and elsewhere. 

Springboard for apps, startups, edge solutions

Envoy has contributed extremely high reliability to service discovery at Lyft. And the company has seen many others improve and build products on top of it. “We’ve seen so many people or end users or companies build fantastic products on top of Envoy,” Klein said. “Whether that’s a more sophisticated internet company like Lyft or a vendor or a cloud vendor … .” 

Some speculate that CNCF projects like Envoy and the Istio service mesh for managing microservices will eventually be bigger than Kubernetes. In the near term, interesting Envoy projects involving mobile and edge devices are coming down the pipe, according to Klein.

“I have, I think, some very exciting projects or plans to bring Envoy to mobile phones and to edge devices starting next year. I’ll have more to say about that in the spring,” he said. “I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity to better evolve how we ingress data from the edge, how we do compute out at the edge, a bunch of other things. And I think Envoy will be at the forefront of that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE