2024 year in review of CNCF and top 30 open source project velocity

Posted on January 29, 2025

By Chris Aniszczyk

By consistently tracking open source project velocity, we are able to see the trends and technologies resonating with developers and end users. We have been tracking these trends since 2017; all previous blogs can be viewed here.

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 and are working to add golang compile time instrumentation.
CNCF projects underpin large scale AI infrastructure and we have Kubeflow inching up to a top 15 spot on the list
Backstage grows solving an important pain point around developer experience and being the most popular open source IdP in the world
OpenFeature makes an appearance for the first time on an annual velocity report in the top 25 and reflects a community wanting open source and feature flag interoperability.

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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