New SODA Foundation EcoProject standardizes Zenko’s open-source codebase for optimal data management — from edge to core to cloud
Calling all Linux developers: Are you moving large data stores across multiple environments? Maybe on-premises to multiple public clouds or from devices at the edge back to a centralized data center?
If so, we are excited to announce that Zenko, our open-source data management software, is now accepted as a SODA Foundation EcoProject. Starting today, Linux developers can use Zenko with the confidence of support from industry-standards organizations such as SODA and the Linux Foundation.
If you didn’t already know, we joined the SODA Foundation as a founding member in June 2020. The foundation is described as “an open-source project under the broader Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, unified, and autonomous data management framework for data mobility from the edge to core to cloud” — a mission that’s directly aligned with our goals for Zenko.
What the heck is Zenko?
In 2017, our dedicated engineers built and released Zenko as an open software codebase for managing data across all three public cloud providers (AWS, GoogleCloud, and Azure).
Zenko was built as cloud-agnostic, providing a unified namespace, access API and search capabilities for data stored locally or in public cloud storage services. Zenko gives users control over data — liberating them from cloud vendor lock-in. Learn more about Zenko on GitHub or on Zenko.io.
What does this mean for developers?
Zenko codebase will become more broadly available to all SODA and Linux communities and developers. We aim to provide a software platform with functionality for users, developers and companies to build on — creating multi-cloud, data management solutions across on-premises storage and cloud services.
Simply put, developers can now leverage, grow or adopt our multi-cloud, on-premises S3 solutions across any public cloud.
Now, let’s take a deep dive into Zenko capabilities…
Cloud-agnostic: Data management across clouds
Zenko’s core functions include an Amazon S3-compatible API server with a multi-cloud metadata namespace. This enables Zenko to provide S3 API endpoint services uniformly across a wide range of backends.
Zenko always stores data in the native format of the target backend storage system or cloud storage service using their standard protocols or APIs. This ensures that the data is open and accessible directly to applications, without having to rely on Zenko.
Enriching data: Workflow engine and simple search for quick access to insights
In addition, Zenko provides an integrated data workflow engine with policies to move and replicate data across these supported backends. It supports AWS S3 extensible metadata tagging to which we have added search capabilities to provide new ways for applications to enrich data and optimize data access.
Top 5 use cases
While the range of cloud data management use cases is broad, we see 5 top use cases consistently emerging with customers:
- Cloud data archiving: Moving dormant or “cold” data to the cloud
- Cloud data bursting: Copying data sets to a public cloud compute service
- Cloud business continuance: Maintaining a second copy of data in the cloud for disaster recovery protection
- Multi-cloud services in AI/ML, DataOps and analytics
- Edge data services: Data captured on the edge, processed and moved to a cloud or central “core” data center
Once developers get their hands on Zenko code through the EcoProject, the spectrum of use cases to be incubated, developed and delivered will expand even further. Finally, if you’d like to investigate a couple of underlying open-source projects delivered as container-based services for deployment in Kubernetes, please be sure to check out:
- CloudServer (S3 API endpoint service)
- Backbeat (asynchronous processing workflow service).
Happy coding! We look forward to furthering our collaboration with SODA Foundation members to extend the value of Zenko to our broader community. Learn more about Zenko on GitHub or on Zenko.io.