Today we are very excited to release our Project Journey Report for Envoy. This is the second reports we have issued for CNCF graduated projects (the first was Kubernetes).
Envoy is a widely-adopted, open source network proxy developed by engineers at Lyft and released on September 14, 2016. It is frequently used in conjunction with deployments of Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies, however is used in many non-cloud environments also.
CNCF’s efforts to nurture the growth of Envoy span a wide range of activities from organizing and running the rapidly growing EnvoyCon to creating webinars and recording case studies to make Envoy more accessible and to foster and nurture the Envoy community. These activities are funded by CNCF’s membership dues and revenues from sponsorship and registration at our conferences.
This is one of a series of reports that help explain our nurturing efforts and some of the positive trends emerging around CNCF hosted projects. This report attempts to objectively assess the state of the Envoy project and how the CNCF has impacted the progress and growth of Envoy. Note – we recognize that it’s not feasible to conclusively sort out correlation and causation but this report tries to document correlations. For the report, we pulled data from multiple sources, particularly CNCF’s own DevStats tool, which provides detailed development statistics for all CNCF projects.
Some of the highlights of the report include:
- Development Velocity – Envoy continues to show strong growth across all four of the key development velocity vectors – code commits, pull requests, issues filed, and authors. Envoy has enjoyed over a 600% increase in the number of project contributors since Envoy joined CNCF.
Cumulative growth of Envoy contributors over time
- Code Diversity – Envoy has actually grown out of the end user community and that community continues to contribute a large percentage of Envoy’s. Additionally Envoy started primarily as a Lyft/Google project but today over four dozen companies are regularly contributing to the project, spanning the world’s largest cloud computing companies down to small startups and individual contributors.
Percentage breakdown of contributions by company since Envoy project launch
- Documentation Expansion – Continuous additions to and improvements of project documentation are essential for the growth of any open source project. Since joining CNCF, the number of authors and companies committing documentation to Envoy has grown by more than 300% and 200%, respectively.
Since joining CNCF in 2017, Envoy has recorded:
- >1.7K contributors
- >10.3K code commits
- >5.7 K pull requests
- >51k contributions
- 176 contributing companies
We’re thrilled that Envoy has come so far in three years and that CNCF has been able to positively impact that growth in the past two years of our collaboration with the Envoy community. Even better, we strongly believe Envoy’s growth has only just begun.
This report is part of CNCF’s commitment to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. Please read and enjoy the report, share your feedback with us – and stay tuned for more project journey reports for other projects.