Top new CNCF projects to look out for
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) gave us Kubernetes and Prometheus — but the ecosystem spans over 90 projects across sandbox, incubating, and graduated tiers. Chris is joined by Annie Talvasto (CNCF/Kubernetes meetup organizer for Finland and host of the Cloud Gossip podcast) to walk through the most exciting projects you should know about.
They cover:
- Helm — the de facto Kubernetes package manager, making deployments, upgrades, and rollbacks dramatically simpler than raw manifests
- Artifact Hub — a centralised CNCF sandbox project for discovering Helm charts and other cloud native artifacts, replacing the old Helm Hub
- Linkerd — a lightweight, Rust-powered service mesh delivering observability, reliability, and security for Kubernetes microservices without complex APIs
- KUDO — the Kubernetes Universal Declarative Operator, enabling stateful app operator creation without thousands of lines of custom Go code
- KEDA — Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling, extending Kubernetes beyond CPU/memory scaling to external event sources like queues and message brokers
Annie also explains CNCF’s three project maturity stages (sandbox, incubating, graduated) and why understanding them matters when evaluating production readiness — along with practical advice on how to get involved in the open source community behind these projects.
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