Adoption & Ecosystem

Who uses it

The repository ships an ADOPTERS.md file with one named organisation. BoCloud, the company that started the project, lists itself as a production adopter and says its customers have run Carina in production and testing for years, typically for cloud native middleware (ADOPTERS.md:9). No other organisation is listed there, and there is no separate CNCF case study, so the public adopter list is short and self-reported.

Organisation	Use case	Source
BoCloud (BeyondCent)	Cloud native middleware on local disks, in production and testing	ADOPTERS.md

Adoption signals

Because the named adopter list is thin, GitHub signals are the more useful measure. As of 2026-06-26 the GitHub REST API reports roughly 724 stars, 86 forks, about 20 contributors, and 40 open issues. The latest release is v0.14.0 (2025-04-16), and the last push was the same week; commits stop after April 2025, which signals slowing maintenance. The project is registered with the OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation) Best Practices badge program as project 6908 and displays a FOSSA license scan badge, both linked from the README.

Ecosystem

• Standard CSI (Container Storage Interface): volumes are requested through a normal StorageClass with provisioner: carina.storage.io (deploy/kubernetes/storageclass-lvm.yaml:6).
• kube-scheduler framework: the scheduler plugin integrates as a Filter and Score extension rather than a separate scheduler.
• Prometheus: metrics live in pkg/metrics with a ServiceMonitor manifest at deploy/kubernetes/prometheus-service-monitor.yaml.
• Linux storage stack: it builds directly on LVM2 (Logical Volume Manager) and the bcache kernel module for tiering.

Alternatives

Carina sits in the LVM-based local CSI family. The closest peers manage local disks on each node; the distributed systems below take a different approach by replicating over the network.

Alternative	Differs by
TopoLVM	The original CRD-mediated, scheduler-extended LVM local CSI design that Carina follows; Carina adds raw-partition and host-path volume types and bcache tiering.
OpenEBS LocalPV-LVM	Also LVM-based local provisioning, part of the broader OpenEBS suite; Carina is narrower and database-focused.
HwameiStor	Another local-disk CSI family that publishes a comparison table placing OpenEBS, Carina, and TopoLVM in the same category.
Rook/Ceph, Longhorn, CubeFS	Distributed storage that replicates over the network for availability; Carina deliberately keeps data on one node for raw local performance.