What is Reva?
Reva is an open source project that was initially developed by CERN. Reva is an inter-operability platform written in Go that aims at connecting cloud storages and application providers in a compatible way by leveraging on the CS3 APIs and therefore being the first and the reference implementation of those.
Name and logo
Reva was an important deity in the ancient Gallaecia region. One of its biggest sanctuaries is the Roman Gallaecian geothermal spring called “As Burgas” in the city of Ourense.
The logo of Reva has been designed by Eamonn Maguire, an ex-CERN member working now for Facebook who has an extraordinary sense of creativity and design.
History
Reva has its origins back to 2017 when @labkode decided to create a cloud benchmarking framework in the Go programming language while he was studying at university. This endeavor led to the creation of ClawIO. The knowledge obtained in this adventure alongside the operational experience gathered from the team running the CERNBox service at CERN led to the development of the first version of Reva, a CERN-targeted software to power the backend system of the CERNBox cloud, used by more than 17,000 users to sync and share 7 Petabytes of data.
During 2018 the fragmentation of cloud services in Europe became a major concern for many institutions because collaboration between clouds was difficult and done in an ad-hoc basis. This preoccupation has been actively acknowledged by many institutions of the CS3 Community. In early 2018, a team at CERN gathered together to analyze the problem and define an initial set of APIs that could potentially help to alleviate the burden of inter-cloud collaboration. The initial version of the CS3 APIs were born. Some months later and many hours typing code, the internal CERN-specific version of Reva was adapted to use the CS3 APIs.
During the rainy day of 30th of January of 2019, during the CS3 Conference held in Rome, CERN moved the the Reva project and the CS3APIs to the CS3 GitHub virtual organization to ensure that further evolution of the software will be driven by the needs of the Educational and Research community. And CERN did so by releasing the code under a permissive Apache 2.0 license to promote free and unrestricted adoption.
Since that day, different entities and individuals have joined the project to shape the future of collaboration.
The next chapter is written by you.