Blog Posts

Project Carvel has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

by Nanci Lancaster and Jen Siegal — Oct 19, 2022

We are excited to announce that on September 13, 2022, Carvel was accepted as a Sandbox project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Each new milestone of our journey would not be possible without the support and contributions of our incredible community and we’d be remiss if we didn’t highlight a few of those individual’s here:

• Scott Rosenberg with TeraSky for always being such an advocate and going above and beyond sharing their knowledge of Carvel with others.
• Robert Van Voorhees and their work with the U.S. Army Software Factory to alleviate pain points in their software development with Carvel.
• David Blum and others with Twilio for their collaboration, contributions, and encouragement.
• Natan Yellin with Robusta.dev for all their hard work with creating informative videos covering Carvel and other Kubernetes tools.
• Joe Beda for his guidance and believing in us from the start.
• Adrien Sales for all their hard work and dedication to the Carvel Windows Application Packages.
• The internal VMware employees like Max Brauer, Leigh Capili, Pete Wall, and Cora Iberkleid.
• The emeritus maintainers that helped to build Carvel along the way: Ben Moss, Cari Lynn, Daniel Helfand, Dennis Leon, Eli Wrenn, Garrett Cheadle, and Steven Locke.

While we are still working through the onboarding process, we look forward to our new home in this vendor-neutral environment for the project as well as gaining guidance from CNCF as Carvel continues to grow as an open source project. We hope that this will encourage others outside of VMware to contribute to the project as well as become maintainers, supporting the project’s growth within the open source ecosystem. Additionally, we hope this donation will open up more opportunities to collaborate with other open source projects within CNCF.

Interested in contributing and learning more about Carvel? ¶

Developers working with Kubernetes face challenges with packaging and distributing software. A core goal of Carvel is to automate the installation and management of software on Kubernetes, while paving a smooth path to getting code to production. Following the Unix principle of a collection of tools, each “doing one thing well,” the Carvel project hosts a set of tools (imgpkg, kapp, kapp-controller, kbld, secretgen-controller, vendir, ytt), allowing users to use them in combination with each other as well as with other tools in the broader cloud native ecosystem.

Here are some great resources to get started in learning more and how to become a contributor:

• README.md
• CONTRIBUTING.md
• GOVERNANCE.md
• Community-membership.md
• Resources on website

Not interested in becoming a contributor but want to join our community? Here are several other ways you can get involved (all subject to change as we start the migrating/onboarding process into CNCF):

• Join Carvel’s slack channel, #carvel in Kubernetes workspace, and connect with over 1000+ Carvel users.
• Find us on GitHub. Suggest how we can improve the project, the docs, or share any other feedback.
• Attend our Community Meetings! Check out the Community page for full details on how to attend.

The Road Ahead ¶

In the coming months, we will be adding features and functionality to further improve the development and delivery of applications on Kubernetes. We want to hear from the wider CNCF community about what problems they are trying to solve and how Carvel can help. With the introduction of Carvel into the CNCF Sandbox and the ongoing support of the community we’re excited for the possibilities ahead!