We are excited to announce that Strimzi has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox Project. The CNCF oversees many projects that provide critical infrastructure in cloud based environments and we are thrilled to be part of that community. From the core Kubernetes project to exciting early stage projects such as CloudEvents we feel Strimzi is in esteemed company.

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Strimzi provides Operators to deploy and manage the components of Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. This includes the Kafka brokers, Apache ZooKeeper, MirrorMaker and Kafka Connect. Having Kubernetes-native APIs makes it easy to manage Kafka topics and users, and there are multiple ways to enable secure access to Kafka from outside the Kubernetes cluster. Recent additions to the project have included an HTTP bridge to enable additional protocol support; improved support for scaling the persistent storage used by the Kafka brokers and monitoring using Prometheus.

Since its inception in 2017 Strimzi has become a production ready mechanism for running Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. Initially begun by three developers, the project now has significantly more than that contributing to making it a success from organisations such as Red Hat, Lightbend and others. It is used in production in industries including telecoms, finance and transportation. Strimzi is used in Knative Eventing as the default Kafka provider and forms the base of other data streaming platforms offering event driven integrations. We hope that membership of the CNCF will allow many more users to adopt Apache Kafka on Kubernetes for their applications.

The Strimzi community is friendly and driven by the desire to further Open Source principles - we are always open to new contributions. Please do get involved, not just through code; documentation improvements, bug reports and blog posts are all appreciated.

As Strimzi moves to the CNCF we are taking the opportunity to make a few changes to the communication methods we use. Firstly, we will be moving to the #Strimzi Channel on the CNCF hosted Slack which, as an enterprise version, has unlimited users and message history. We understand that moving the Slack channel is painful for all the users of the current channel, but feel that in this case, the benefits outweigh the pain. Secondly, we will be moving to a new mailing list, again hosted by CNCF. The new mailing list will be cncf-strimzi-users@lists.cncf.io.

However, on a technical level, most users will not notice any change from the move to the CNCF. The release cadence of the project will be unchanged, no breaking code or license changes are planned and the development team remains the same. Strimzi has adopted a simple governance model at the suggestion of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). Over time we hope that more developers will contribute to Strimzi and become maintainers.

We would like to thank the TOC for their work in overseeing the CNCF and taking time to understand the value delivered by Strimzi. Alexis Richardson and Matt Klein deserve additional thanks for sponsoring the project into the Sandbox - we are truly grateful.

The next chapter in the life of Strimzi is going to be an exciting one as part of the CNCF. We hope you will join us on that journey!