Documentary on Flux: 2 parts (out of 4) released

KubeFM and ControlPlane have filmed “The Making of Flux,” a series about Flux. It reveals the story of this project through the words of people directly involved in it. Currently, two episodes have been released on YouTube:

- Ep1 “The Origin” (22 mins), where Alexis Richardson, Andrew Martin, and Chris Aniszczyk cover the foundation of GitOps and creation of Flux, and its path to the CNCF graduation;
- Ep2 “The Rewrite” (45 mins), where Stefan Prodan and Michael Bridgen tell how Flux initially worked and why it needed a complete v2 rewrite.

Two more episodes will follow soon.

#video #gitops #cncfprojects

+10 new CNCF Sandbox projects accepted in 2025

Two days ago, a few Open Source projects were accepted to the CNCF Sandbox. This was the second batch of new projects since March, when we announced the latest additions to CNCF. In this post, we list all new arrivals to the CNCF Sandbox from those two batches:

[May 2025]

1. urunc — "runc for unikernels," a CRI-compatible runtime for running unikernels and application kernels as containers. [application request's GitHub issue #353]

2. xRegistry — an abstract model (specification) for managing metadata about resources and a REST-based interface to discover, create, modify and delete those resources. [#357]

3. ModelPack — open standards for packaging, distributing and running AI artifacts in the Cloud Native environment. [#358]

4. kagent — a programming framework for DevOps and platform engineers to run AI agents in Kubernetes. [#360] By the way, we covered the project before in this post.

5. Cadence — a distributed orchestration engine to execute asynchronous long-running business logic. [#368]

[September 2025]

6. OAuth2-Proxy ­— a generic reverse proxy that provides authentication with Google, Azure, OIDC and other identity providers. [#397]

7. Oxia — a scalable metadata store and coordination system for large-scale distributed systems. [#394]

8. HolmesGPT — an AI agent for investigating problems in cloud, finding the root cause, and suggesting remediations. [#392]

9. Cedar — an authorisation policy language for expressing fine-grained permissions as easy-to-understand policies enforced in applications. [#371]

10. Dalec — a declarative format for building system packages and containers in a secure way for supply chain security. [#396]

#news #cncfprojects

Two newly graduated and one incubated CNCF projects

Yesterday, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee voted to move the following CNCF projects to a higher level of their maturity:

- Crossplane, the cloud native control plane framework, became Graduated (GitHub issue #1788)
- Dragonfly, a P2P-based file distribution and image acceleration system, became Graduated (#1358)
- OpenFGA, a high-performance and flexible authorisation/permission system built for developers, became Incubating (#1287)

#news #cncfprojects

Helm 4 has just been released

Less than 30 minutes ago, Helm v4.0.0 appeared on GitHub. This release, celebrated during KubeCon NA, came 6 years after Helm v3 and offers significant improvements. They include:

- Redesigned plugin system with WebAssembly-based plugins
- Post-renderers as plugins
- Server Side Apply support
- Improved resource watching based on kstatus
- Local content-based caching

Earlier today, this release was also announced on the CNCF blog, together with the 10th anniversary of Helm.

P.S. If you’re interested in seeing even more features for Helm, considering the Nelm project might be helpful, too.

#news #cncfprojects #releases

CNCF project velocity 2025 report

Key takeaways from the latest CNCF project velocity report:
1. Kubernetes continues to lead with the largest contributor base.
2. Backstage has more than doubled its contributions since 2024.
3. OpenTelemetry saw a 39% rise in commits and 35% rise in a contributor base.

Top 10 CNCF projects by their velocity in 2025:

1. Kubernetes
2. Cilium
3. OpenTelemetry
4. Prometheus
5. Argo
6. Meshery
7. Envoy
8. Backstage
9. Keycloak
10. Kubeflow

This GitHub repo has all the data, and here's our post on a previous velocity report published in July 2025.

#news #cncfprojects

Kyverno became a CNCF Graduated project

Kyverno, a Kubernetes-native policy engine originally developed in Nirmata, has become the latest addition to the list of CNCF Graduated projects. About 6 hours ago, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee completed the relevant voting process for this project.

Today’s Kyverno adopters include Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Saxo Bank, LinkedIn, Spotify, US DoD Platform One, OVHcloud, and many other well-known organisations worldwide.

#cncfprojects #news #security

Notable CNCF projects’ news from KubeCon EU 2026

Red Hat donated llm-d to the CNCF Sandbox. This distributed inference serving stack optimised for Kubernetes was created a year ago, together with CoreWeave, IBM, Google, and NVIDIA.

Broadcom donated Velero to the CNCF Sandbox. This backup tool for Kubernetes was formerly known as Heptio Ark and originally created by Heptio, a startup acquired by VMware in 2018.

Tekton, a Kubernetes-native framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems, was moved from the CD Foundation to the CNCF as an Incubating project.

#news #cncfprojects

The documentary on Backstage is available

Yesterday, the latest documentary video about a CNCF project, “Backstage: From Spreadsheet to Standard”, landed on YouTube. It happened shortly after its premiere at KubeCon EU 2026.

In 32 minutes, this video tells the story of Backstage, from its origins at Spotify to modern days. It features the interviews with Spotify employees and Backstage maintainers, including Pia Nilsson, Dave Zolotusky, Petter Måhlén, Tyson Singer, Jimmy Mårdel, Fredrik Adelöw, Ben Lambert, and others.

P.S. Previously, the following documentaries were released:

- “Kubernetes: The Documentary”: Part 1 (24:54) and Part 2 (31:18)
- “Prometheus: The Documentary” (27:00)
- “Inside Envoy: The Proxy for the Future” (31:49)
- “Inside Argo: Automating the Future” (32:15)
- “The Making of Flux”: The Origin (22:21), The Rewrite (44:57), The Scale (23:09), The Future (26:52).

#video #cncfprojects

OpenTelemetry graduates, Microcks incubates

Two days ago, the CNCF TOC voted to graduate the OpenTelemetry project. Today, OpenTelemetry is used "at hundreds (potentially thousands) of organizations worldwide", with dozens of them listed here. It's also supported by major observability vendors, including Dash0, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, and many more.

A week ago, another CNCF project, Microcks, was officially moved to the Incubating status. Microcks is a tool for API mocking and testing. It was created by an individual in 2015 and accepted to the CNCF Sandbox in 2023. Its public adopters include Amadeus, Amway, BNP PARIBAS, Michelin, and Nordic Semiconductor.

#news #cncfprojects

HAMi became a CNCF Incubating project

HAMi was originally known as k8s-vGPU-scheduler and today stands for Heterogeneous AI computing virtualisation Middleware. It enables slicing a physical GPU into units by memory/core/device count, enforcing hard runtime isolation, and scheduling Pods using binpack, spread, and topology-aware policies. You can learn more about this project from this overview.

HAMi joined the CNCF Sandbox in August, 2024. Two weeks ago, the CNCF TOC voted to promote it to the incubating level. This change was formally announced yesterday.

#news #cncfprojects

Buildpacks graduates, k8gb incubates

Following the CNCF TOC votes that happened over the last weekend, two CNCF projects were promoted to the next level:

1. Buildpacks, a set of specifications and tooling that transform application source code into container images that can run on any cloud, became a Graduated project. It was started by Pivotal and Heroku in January 2018, joined the CNCF Sandbox in October 2018, and became Incubated in November 2020. The companies that adopted Buildpacks include Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Salesforce, and VMware by Broadcom.

2. k8gb, a Kubernetes global balancer, became an Incubating project. It originated in Absa Group in 2019 and joined the CNCF Sandbox in March 2021. Current k8gb adopters include Eficode, Millennium bcp, and PagBank.

#news #cncfprojects

Confidential Containers became a CNCF Incubating project

Another level up has just happened in the CNCF, with its TOC accepting moving Confidential Containers to the Incubating level. This project enables confidential computing by leveraging hardware-based TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) to protect containers and data by encrypting data during computation.

Confidential Containers started in 2021 by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, and other companies. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2022. Today, this technology is used in IBM LinuxONE, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubermatic KubeOne, Alibaba Cloud, and several other solutions.

#news #cncfprojects #security

Kubeflow became a CNCF Graduated project

The summer series of CNCF level-ups keeps going, and Kubeflow has just joined the list of the organisation’s most mature (i.e. Graduated) projects. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted for this graduation last Friday.

Kubeflow is a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes that serves as a foundation for K8s-based AI platforms. Its subprojects include Pipelines for end-to-end ML workflows, Trainer for distributed AI model training and LLM fine-tuning, Katib for AutoML, and a Kubernetes operator for Apache Spark.

Kubeflow originated in Google, with its first public announcement in 2017. It was accepted into the CNCF as an Incubating project in July 2023. Today, its adopters include Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Tencent.

#news #cncfprojects #aiml

k8gb v1.0.0

k8gb, a Kubernetes Global Balancer, originated at Absa Group. More than six years have passed since the first whiteboard session in Johannesburg, conducted by Yury Tsarev and Bradley Andersen, both employed by this company at the time. In 2021, k8gb was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, and earlier this year, as we mentioned recently, it became a CNCF Incubating project.

Yesterday, right during its 100th community meeting, the k8gb maintainers pushed the v1.0.0 release. This update highlights a significant milestone in the project's maturity.

#releases #cncfprojects #networking

Karmada became a CNCF Graduated project

Karmada extends the standard Kubernetes API, allowing orchestration of applications across multiple clusters, clouds, and regions without modifying the apps themselves. Earlier this month, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to graduate Karmada, and the decision was formally announced on the CNCF blog now.

Karmada originated in Huawei and was publicly announced at the Huawei Developer Conference 2021. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in September 2021 and promoted to the Incubating level in December 2023. Today, Karmada adopters include Alibaba Cloud, Bloomberg, Huawei, Trip.com, Vivo, and Wellhub.

#news #cncfprojects

KubeVM from VMware Tanzu joins CNCF Sandbox

Tanzu, VMware's Kubernetes platform, has a VM Operator project that enables virtual machine management via a Kubernetes-style declarative API. It brought to life another project called KubeVM, which was developed in a separate branch of its repo and implemented “a vendor-neutral Kubernetes API for managing the full lifecycle of virtual machines on any hypervisor, implemented through pluggable providers.”

How is it different from KubeVirt? Here's how the KubeVM authors explain: “KubeVM leaves the VM as a native object of the underlying platform and uses Kubernetes as the API surface, delegating placement, migration, and storage to that platform. The two answer the same question for different starting conditions: Kubernetes as the only infrastructure layer, versus Kubernetes as a front door to an existing one. The relationship is intended to be integration: a KubeVirt provider is on KubeVM's roadmap, so the portable API can run on KubeVirt.”

A month ago, KubeVM applied to joining the CNCF Sandbox. A few days ago, the project was accepted by the CNCF TOC.

#news #cncfprojects #virtualisation

gVisor was donated to CNCF and joins its Sandbox

gVisor is a well-known "container sandbox", an application kernel that runs in userspace and implements a Linux-like interface to isolate running applications and the host operating system. It was developed by Google and became Open Source in 2018. Today, gVisor is part of the numerous Google products, including GKE, Google Cloud Run, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.

In September, Google opened a formal request to consider gVisor for the CNCF Sandbox. By the end of the month, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept it. In October, a blog post announcing the donation of gVisor to the CNCF was published. It also revealed the gVisor author' intention to begin moving to the CNCF Incubated projects in the next few months.

#news #cncfprojects

Cozystack became a CNCF Incubating project

The CNCF TOC has just voted to promote Cozystack to the Incubating level. Cozystack is a platform and framework for building clouds offering Kubernetes and various managed services, including virtual machines, databases, and more, all based on well-known Open Source solutions. The project originated in Ænix and was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2025.

#news #cncfprojects

KubeVirt and NATS became CNCF Graduated projects

A few days ago, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to graduate KubeVirt and NATS.

KubeVirt, a virtual machine management add-on for Kubernetes, was accepted to the CNCF in 2019 and incubated in 2022. Its adopters today include ARM, Civo, Cloudflare, Microsoft, Nebius, NVIDIA, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, and Swisscom.

NATS, a high-performance cloud- and edge-native messaging system, was accepted to CNCF in 2018 as an Incubating project. Last year, this project went through a drama involving its original owner (Synadia) trying to reclaim ownership from the CNCF, but it ended well, and the project was left with the CNCF. Today, NATS's notable adopters include Alibaba, Baidu, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Mastercard, PayPal, Siemens, and Walmart.

#news #cncfprojects