As part of the KubeCon EU keynotes, the CNCF provided a series of project updates underlying the notable changes in the ecosystem. The information provided focused on the ongoing initiatives, adoption rate, and notable publications or releases.
As described in their graduation criteria, CNCF projects have a maturity level of sandbox, incubating, or graduated, corresponding to the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority tiers of the Crossing the Chasm diagram. Besides meeting the sandbox stage requirements, a project reaching the incubation stage needs to meet additional conditions, such as having a healthy number of committers, a clear versions scheme, and at least one public reference implementation of the specifications.
The projects with notable updates provided during the conference are:
Chaos Mesh: initially created for the open-source distributed database TiDB, it has currently gathered 5K stars on its 140 contributors backed GitHub repository. It is a versatile chaos engineering platform that orchestrates chaos experiments in Kubernetes environments. Sixty organizations have adopted one of the two versions available (2.0 and 2.2).
Knative: provides solutions for running serverless containers, taking care of the details of networking and auto-scaling (including scaling to zero). It also implements an eventing mechanism allowing the building of modern applications by attaching computing to a data stream with declarative event connectivity. Major adopters count on an emerging company in the supply chain security space that uses the project as a backbone for developing its applications. The GitHub project reached 4.5k stars and is maintained by 110 contributors.
Flux: provides a complete Continuous Delivery (CD) platform on top of Kubernetes, supporting standard practices and tooling in the ecosystem. It was the second technology in the Adopt category of Technology Radar other than Helm. They undertook a security audit that didn’t yield any major security, engineering, or design flaw. They already implemented the recommendations. Even though relying on just 12 contributors, the project counts 6.8k stars.
Longhorn: is a distributed block storage system for Kubernetes, designed to run on top of different types of physical storage devices, infrastructures, and architectures. The most notable version so far: 1.2.4, brought improved scalability and CPU usage. The version is already used by other open-source projects as well. The features list prepared for 1.3 contains long-awaited features like CI snapshot reports and mutual TLS. The GitHub project gathered 3.8K stars and it is backed by 59 contributors.
OpenTelemetry: is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs targeting instrumentation, generation, collection, and exporting of telemetry data. It was well adopted and used in production by major companies. The project had a release candidate in mid-May and its GitHub repository counts 2.6K stars and 137 contributors.
Dapr: gives application developers a set of primitives in the form of pub/sub, state management, secrets management, event triggers, and secure and reliable service-to-service calls. The most notable release so far is 1.7.3. The project has 183 contributors, multiple adapters, and 18K stars.
Cilium: provides networking, security, and observability for cloud-native environments by acting as a CNI and enhanced networking layer for Kubernetes using eBPF. It joined the CNCF in October 2021 as a "service mesh without sidecar". The most notable release is 1.12 bringing Kubernetes ingress. It also had the involvement of 400 participants as beta testers of cilium service mesh. The GitHub project counts 12K stars and 413 contributors.
CloudEvents: is a specification for describing event data in common formats to provide interoperability across services, platforms, and systems. Noteworthy changes include support for use of the1.0 Protobuf specification and a draft for XML. There is an ongoing effort for supporting the full eventing lifecycle. The project received 3.4K stars and 101 contributors.
Operator framework: is a toolkit for managing Kubernetes native applications (operators) in an effective, automated, and scalable way. Among the exciting updates you can count: are extensions with custom Go code and improvements on the Java Quarkus plugin. The project counts 5.7K stars and 31 contributors.
CRI-O: implements the Container Runtime Interface designed to enable the use of the Open Container Initiative. The latest version has improved performance when listing containers and pods. Seccomp became the default in version 1.24. The GitHub project counts 4K stars and it is supported by 223 contributors.
Falco: is an eBPF runtime security project providing intrusion and abnormality detection for Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and Cloud Foundry. Besides big stability improvements, version 0.31.0 brings also a Go SDK. Backed by 147 contributors the project counts almost 5K stars.
NATS: is a messaging system allowing secure communication across various combinations of cloud vendors, on-premise, edge, web and mobile, and devices. The current version promises a more predictable memory usage. The GitHub project counts almost 11K stars and 92 contributors.
gRPC: is a modern remote procedure call framework supporting multiple environments. Version 1.46 brought to its users proxy less gRPC service mesh with Istio, gRPC observability, proxy less mesh security, and a simpler architecture across clusters and regions. The project currently has 34.4 K stars and it is supported by 722 contributors.
ArgoCD: is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. The efforts of the almost 700 contributors focused on security in the last six months, mostly driven by the outcome of a recent security audit. The latest version is 2.3 and contains a cloud-native dashboard. The project has gained 9.4K stars so far.
The CNCF announced at KubeConEU reaching the eight hundred members milestone seven years after this effort started. With a continuous influx of new projects reaching the needed maturity to be awarded graduate status the ecosystem is more and more robust, becoming a one-stop-shop for organizations that require cloud-native technologies. With more than forty projects in graduate and incubating statuses and other ecosystems betting on the cloud as well, the cloud-native landscape seems to be more and more attractive.