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title: About Reva
linkTitle: About
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<p class="lead">A brief story of a young open source project.</p>
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<h2>What is Reva?</h2>

<p class="text-muted">
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.

</p>

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<h2>Name and logo</h2>

<p>
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.
</p>

<p>
The logo of Reva has been designed by <strong>Eamonn Maguire</strong>, an ex-CERN member working now for Facebook who has an extraordinary sense of creativity and 
design.
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<h2>History</h2>

<p>
Reva has its origins back to 2017 when <a href="https://github.com/labkode">@labkode</a> 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 <a href="https://github.com/clawio">ClawIO</a>.
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.
</p>

<p>
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 <a href="https://www.cs3community.org">CS3 Community</a>.
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 <a href="https://cs3org.github.io/cs3apis">CS3 APIs</a> were born.
Some months later and many hours typing code, the internal CERN-specific version of Reva was adapted to use the <a href="https://cs3org.github.io/cs3apis">CS3 APIs</a>.
</p>

<p>
During the rainy day of 30th of January of 2019, during the <a href="https://indico.cern.ch/event/726040/timetable/#20190128">CS3 Conference</a> held in Rome, CERN moved the 
the Reva project and the CS3APIs to the <a href="https://github.com/cs3org/">CS3 GitHub virtual organization</a> 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.
</p>

<p>
Since that day, different entities and individuals have joined the project to shape the future of collaboration.
</p>

<p><strong>The next chapter is written by you.</strong></p>

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