CNCF Landscape and top 15 projects

The CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) was created in 2015 by Google and the Linux Foundation to encourage the development and collaboration of Kubernetes and other cloud-native solutions.

The foundation can be defined as an open-source and neutral center to make cloud-native computing universal and sustainable.

Currently, 172 projects are categorized as Graduated, Incubating, Sandbox, and Archived. Categorization criteria include adoption rate, governance, longevity, and whether the project is mature enough that a product can be built around it.

Graduated and Incubating projects are considered stable and are already successfully used in production environments. On the other hand, Sandbox projects are at an early stage and require more community involvement.

Through the CNCF Landscape tool, it is possible to view the current status and category of all projects:

https://www.cncf.io/projects/

In the figure below, I present the top 15 projects ranked by the amount of “commits” in the last year (January 2022 to January 2023). This was the metric chosen by CNCF to identify the speed of evolution of projects:

In collaborative and open-source projects, a “commit” is an operation performed by a contributor/developer that commits code changes to a shared repository. These changes are performed on files that are part of the source code.

The Kubernetes project continues to be responsible for the most significant number of contributions and commits. In the last year, some of the companies that most participated in the project, in order of number of contributions, were Google, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, IBM, Suse, Amazon, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, and Apple.

Analyzing the projects positioned just below Kubernetes, which had more than 10,000 “commits” in the last year, it is interesting to highlight the position of KubeVirt, a project classified as Incubating.

The growth of this project confirms the need to provide developers with an environment that combines virtual server-based and container-based applications, working side by side. It enables lifecycle management and migration of application architectures (monolithic to microservices) in a unified and scalable way. By the way, some market solutions already deliver this capacity.

The positioning of the Open Telemetry project, with the second highest number of “commits”, demonstrates the demand for a unified framework for “multi-environments” and “multi-clouds” observability aimed at SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams.

The positioning of the Backstage project, an open platform for building developer portals, shows the strong movement around the Developer Experience (DevX – Developer eXperience). Here is a post I wrote on the subject: Developer Experience (DevX), Developer Platform, and the Backstage framework – Cloud and Roll (cloudnroll.com)

Below is the list of projects in the Graduated and Incubating categories:

Graduated:

• Argo: Continuous Integration & Delivery
• containerd: Container Runtime
• CoreDNS: Coordination & Service Discovery
• cri-o: Container Runtime
• envoy: Service Proxy
• etcd: Coordination & Service Discovery
• Fluentd: Logging
• Flux: Continuous Integration & Delivery
• Harbor: Container Registry
• Helm: Application Definition & Image Build
• Istio: Service Mesh
• Istio: Embedded Functions
• Jaeger: Tracing
• Keda: Installable Platform
• Kubernetes: Scheduling & Orchestration
• Linkerd: Service Mesh
• Open Policy Agent: Security & Compliance
• Prometheus: Monitoring
• Rook: Cloud Native Storage
• Spiffe: Key Management
• Spire: Key Management
• Tuf: Security & Compliance
• TiKV: Database
• Vitess: Database

Incubating:

• Backstage: Application Definition & Image Build
• Buildpacks.io: Application Definition & Image Build
• Cert Manager: Security & Compliance
• Chaos Mesh: Chaos Engineering
• Cilium: Cloud Native Network
• Cloud Custodian: Automation & Configuration
• Cloudevents: Streaming & Messaging
• CNI: Cloud Native Network
• Contour: Service Proxy
• Cortex: Monitoring
• Crossplane: Scheduling & Orchestration
• CudeFS: Cloud Native Storage
• Dapr: Framework
• Dragonfly: Container Registry
• Emissary Ingress: API Gateway
• Falco: Security & Compliance
• gRPC: Remote Procedure Call
• In-toto: Security & Compliance
• Keptn: Continuous Integration & Delivery
• Keycloak: Security & Compliance
• Knative: Installable Platform
• KubeEdge: Automation & Configuration
• Kubeflow: Scheduling & Orchestration
• KubeVela: Application Definition & Image Build
• KubeVirt: Application Definition & Image Build
• Kyverno: Security & Compliance
• Litmus: Chaos Engineering
• Longhorn: Cloud Native Storage
• Nats: Streaming & Messaging
• Notaru: Security & Compliance
• OpenKruise: Continuous Integration & Delivery
• OpenMetrics: Monitoring
• OpenTelemetry: Tracing
• Operator Framework: Application Definition & Image Build
• Thanos: Monitoring
• Volcano: Scheduling & Orchestration

Referencies:

https://www.cncf.io/

https://github.com/cncf/velocity