As part of the keynotes on the last day of KubeConEU + CloudNative Conference, CNCF had announced the projects that graduated to higher levels of maturity, making their usage recommended and support necessary. Among the newly graduating projects we can count known names like Prometheus, Jaeger or Envoy. While ArgoCD, OpenTelemetry or Flux reached incubating status.

As described in their graduation criteria, "CNCF projects have a maturity level of sandbox, incubating, or graduated, which corresponds to the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority tiers of the Crossing the Chasm diagram. The maturity level is a signal by CNCF as to what sorts of enterprises should be adopting different projects. Projects increase their maturity by demonstrating their sustainability to CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee: that they have adoption, a healthy rate of changes, and committers from multiple organizations; have adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct; and have achieved and maintained the Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. Full details are in the Graduation Criteria". CNCF, represented by Jasmine James, Emily Fox and Ricardo Rocha, brought forward this session's graduates:

Envoy: Originally developed at Lyft, this is an edge and service proxy promising high performance with a small footprint. Among its initiatives, it just introduced envoy based ingress and API gateway to build contour and emissary straight in the project. This will help reduce redundant work going on in the community but also making Envoy a much stronger out-of-the-box option for development and platform teams.

Jaeger: Originally developed at Uber is a monitoring and troubleshooting tool for microservices-based distributed systems. Among its features you can count distributed context propagation and transaction monitoring, service dependency analysis, root cause analysis and performance/ latency optimization.

Included among the current initiatives: Adaptive sampling fully automated dynamic control, going all-in on OpenTelemetry by adopting OpenTelemetry SDKs and by retiring native Jaeger SDKs. Another ongoing effort is around adopting Cassandra and Elasticsearch, an initiative where the help of the community would be highly appreciated.

Prometheus: originally built at SoundCloud, this is a systems monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals. It joined CNCF in 2016 as the second hosted project, after Kubernetes.

Its initiatives include the prometheus conformance program targeted on ensuring interoperability between different projects and vendors in the prometheus monitoring space. Another initiative is the prometheus agent mode, a feature targeted to scenarios where no local storage is needed or possible (like edge nodes). In these situations writing to remote storage is available (like Thanos or cortex).

Linkerd: It presents itself as being the smallest, simplest service mesh in the world. To provide extra assurance that it is ready for production, it passed an external security audit. Among its most notable adopters you can count XBox Cloud Gaming. Its current initiatives count automatic cross-cluster failover capabilities that promise automatic traffic redirection from a failing service to different ones.

TiKV: A cloud native distributed key value storage promising single digit millisecond latency. Among the ongoing initiatives, raft engine availability should reduce bandwidth with 30%, making it more cost effective on the cloud and adaptive write and pending flow control. Pessimistic transactions are 20% faster in the tool.

TUF: The Update Framework is a framework for secure content delivery of updates. It protects from various types of supply chain attacks and promises resilience to compromise. One of the most important initiatives on the project side was the python refactor that resulted in a much smaller and robust code base to maintain, but also in a more ergonomic API.

ROOK: Cloud native storage operator for Kubernetes. Release 1.9 promises to deliver support for Ceph Quincy, the most recent release of Quincy.

HELM: A wide adopted package manager for finding, sharing apps on Kubernetes. One of the most requested features from the HELM community wasOpen Container Initiative support, so starting with version 3.8.0 of helm you can store charts in container registries.

Seven years after its inception, CNFC’s graduate landscape got enriched with eight new projects among which veterans like Prometheus or Helm, reaching sixteen projects. More than that, the number of incubated projects reached thirty three, after it was announced that fourteen new projects were awarded incubation status, among them ArgoCD, Flux and OpenTelemetry.