Alibaba Cloud created Dragonfly in 2015, originally to ease file distribution. By 2017, when it was adopted to share containers within Kubernetes environments, it was being used by the Chinese cloud service to share 3.4PB each month. It was originally accepted into the CNCF Sandbox program in October 2018.
A peer-to-peer file sharing mechanism could help cloud native deployments in distributing new and updated container images across a cluster more quickly and with less stress to the upstream network.