The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Artifact Hub as a CNCF incubating project.
Artifact Hub is a web-based application that enables finding, installing, and publishing cloud native packages and configurations. Discovering useful cloud native artifacts like Helm charts can be difficult with general-purpose search engines. Artifact Hub makes finding artifacts easier by providing target searches.
“Artifact Hub was created to bring together the discovery of cloud native artifacts. Prior to Artifact Hub, people had to use general search engines or targeted ones for a specific type (like the now deprecated Helm Hub) to find artifacts,” said Matt Farina, Artifact Hub maintainer and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. “The experience had room for improvement. Dan Kohn, the founding executive director of CNCF, noticed this problem and brought together people involved with it at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 in San Diego. Artifact Hub was born from those conversations and became a sandbox project in 2020.”
Numerous types of artifacts are supported, including Argo templates, Backstage plugins, Container images, CoreDNS plugins, Falco rules, Headlamp plugins, Helm charts and plugins, Inspektor gadgets, KCL modules, KEDA scalers, Keptn integrations, Knative client plugins, Kubectl plugins, KubeArmor policies, Kubewarden policies, Kyverno policies, Meshery designs, OLM operators, OPA and Gatekeeper policies, OpenCost plugins, Tekton packages, and Tinkerbell actions.
Since joining the CNCF Sandbox, Artifact Hub has:
- Added more than 20 types of artifacts it supports;
- Added more detail on projects – for example providing vulnerability scan results where an artifact references container images;
- Highlighted related artifacts;
- Informed people of official sources;
- Continually grown the number of artifacts listed by 18x and hundreds of new packages are added every month, and more.
“We are thrilled to provide an intuitive and easy to use solution that allows our users to discover and publish multiple kinds of Cloud Native artifacts from a single place. At the moment we support 26 different types of artifacts (most from other CNCF projects), and we’re looking forward to adding more in the future!” – Sergio Castaño Arteaga and Cintia Sanchez Garcia, Software Engineers at CNCF
Notable Milestones
The main public deployment is available at https://artifacthub.io.
- 1.6k GitHub Stars
- 1.8k pull requests (excluding dependabot ones)
- 818 issues
- 41 contributors
- 41 Releases
- 15k packages and 285k releases
- 4.1k repositories (the source of the packages published on Artifact Hub)
- 2.5k registered organizations and 31k users
- Monthly packages views keep growing, reaching ~700k at the moment
For the future, Artifact Hub’s roadmap is focused on three categories:
- Adding support for more Cloud Native artifacts from CNCF projects
- Improving documentation to consolidate useful information spread across issues, discussions and Slack conversations
- Continuing to improve users’ experience to make it easier to find artifacts and explore their content
As a CNCF-hosted project, Artifact Hub is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. Artifact Hub joins incubating technologies Backstage, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, Cloud Custodian, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, Crossplane, CubeFS, Dapr, Dragonfly, Emissary-Ingress, gRPC, in-toto, Karmada, Keptn, Keycloak, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenFeature, OpenKruise, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Strimzi, Thanos, and Volcano. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.