We are very pleased to announce that Crossplane has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project! The team of contributors has worked incredibly hard to grow the community and mature the project, so this is a great validation that Crossplane has reached a new level of maturity. This especially feels like well deserved timing as the project is really hitting its stride and has started to find a solid fit and genuine demand in the ecosystem by enabling users to:
- Provision infrastructure declaratively using the Kubernetes API
- Publish their own declarative infrastructure API without code
- Run and deploy applications alongside infrastructure
Crossplane was launched in late 2018 by Upbound, by the same team that created Rook, another CNCF project that is now very near to reaching the "graduated" level of maturity. We have learned many lessons from our stewardship of Rook and have been fortunate to carry these with us into our stewardship of Crossplane too.
Upbound has recently been joined by more partners like Alibaba and Microsoft to collaborate and contribute to a shared vision. As any open source effort attracts more contributors and companies, it's very important to ensure that the project has a neutral home to facilitate fair and open collaboration. The CNCF provides a great home for this type of open effort, so donating Crossplane to the foundation is a significant step for securing an open future for the project. Furthermore, in preparation for the CNCF donation, we instituted a formalized open governance for the project and welcomed new maintainers to further codify and solidify this commitment.
Joining the CNCF is also a statement of technical vetting of the project by its Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and Special Interest Groups (SIG). A key part of the acceptance criteria is writing a formal proposal and presenting to an applicable SIG for feedback and discussion, followed finally by a formal vote from the TOC. This process enabled discussion and exploration into some of the finer technical details, the project charter, roadmap, and strategic vision, with a neutral panel of experts in the industry. This vetting then gives the ecosystem confidence that the project is technically sound and has a promising future.
Finally, the visibility and awareness of the project is certainly increased by joining the CNCF. The Foundation has broad reach and influence and is a trusted source that members of the cloud native landscape seek out to learn about new technology. By joining the CNCF, we'll be able to build on the traction in the ecosystem that we've already seen and continue to reach new users and contributors that could benefit from adopting the project. We're definitely excited about this new source of community growth!
While the project is being donated to a new vendor neutral home in the CNCF, there will not be any changes to the development processes and release schedule that we have been using for multiple successful releases. You can still expect a monthly minor release around the middle of every month. The development team also does not change, as all core contributors will continue their regular development efforts and contributions. Furthermore, the project licensing does not change at all. The project remains Apache 2 licensed and follows a strong open governance model.
Get involved!
We are beyond excited to join the CNCF and take Crossplane to the next level. We'll be working towards a v1.0 release that we can declare "stable" and we are very motivated to reach that next important milestone.
We cannot wait for the Crossplane community to continue to grow and would love for you to get involved. We especially extend a very warm welcome to new folks just learning about us from the CNCF and invite you to join us too! Whether you are a developer, user, or just interested in what we're up to, feel free to join us via one of the following methods: