As someone who uses, follows and contributes to open source ecosystems, keeping track of emerging projects is a challenge. The velocity of open source just keeps speeding up. Therefore, listening to the community is an essential part of tracking what is useful to others, as new technologies or tools become more relevant.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem is expanding so quickly, it’s hard to keep up with the latest developments. There are so many new projects entering the community. Within the CNCF there are stages for these projects as they mature and build community. Upon passing the initial requirements, the CNCF accepts a project into the Sandbox — where they mature and grow. Once they have passed specific milestones, they move into the Incubation process. Finally, they continue to mature and Graduate to become full-fledged members of the CNCF community.

Some more recent additions to the foundation are worth noting as having entered the sandbox status with CNCF between June 2020 and mid-September 2020. While there are many, I’ve tried to pick a few interesting projects that we’re especially excited to watch grow.

Kubernetes-Specific Projects

There are several projects which either extend or provide new distributions on top of Kubernetes. Since Kubernetes is the core project for CNCF, this makes sense. New incubation projects include the very popular K3S, which is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed for IoT and Edge. It was contributed by Rancher. Similarly, OpenYurt, which Alibaba contributed, is also built on Kubernetes — but is not a distribution and is instead implemented by add-ons, making the approach different from K3S.

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