As we reach mid-year 2024, a look at CNCF, Linux Foundation, and top 30 open source project velocity

Posted on July 11, 2024

Staff post by Chris Aniszczyk

Date/Time: July 11 at 8am

For the last several years we have tracked open source project velocity, which has enabled us to monitor the trends and technologies that resonate with developers and end users. For comparison, have a look at past timeframes from our blogs.

Here are the main takeaways I see from these charts:

Kubernetes continues to mature with its consistent and largest contributor base
OpenTelemetry continues to grow its contributor base and remains the second highest velocity project; they recently added profiling as a new signal type
Backstage grows solving an important pain point around developer experience
GitOps continues to be important in the cloud native ecosystem, where projects like Argo and Flux continue to cultivate large communities
Crossplane grew its contributor base by over 20% in the last year reflecting a desire for open source control planes in the era of open source relicensing issues
KeyCloak joined CNCF last year as an incubating project and has a large community pushing open source identity and access management forward
In many cases, CNCF projects underpin large scale AI infrastructure and we have Kubeflow appearing on the top 30 CNCF project list for the first time in 2023.

CNCF projects – Last 12 months (interactive map)

Linux Foundation Projects – Last 12 months (interactive map)

Top 30 open source projects – Last 12 months (interactive map)

NOTE: We use bubble charts to show three axes of data: commits, authors, and comments/pull requests, and plot on a log-log chart to show the data across large scales.

The bubble’s area is proportional to the number of authors
The y-axis is the total number of pull requests and issues
The x-axis is the number of commits

All of the the current and past reports are available on GitHub, as well as a list and charts on the Google sheets below:

All of the scripts used to generate this data are at https://github.com/cncf/velocity (under an Apache 2.0 license). If you see any errors, please open an issue there.

Past blog posts about project velocity:

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