5 Must‑Watch CNCF Projects to Follow in 2023

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), founded in 2015, promotes open standards and projects that shape the future of cloud computing.

CNCF currently hosts 141 projects organized into four maturity levels:

Sandbox : Experimental projects not yet widely tested in production.

Incubating : Projects used in production by a few users with a healthy contributor pool.

Graduated : Stable, widely adopted, production‑ready projects with thousands of contributors.

Archived : Projects that have reached end‑of‑life and are no longer active.

Here are five CNCF projects you should watch in 2023: Teller, OpenCost, OpenFunction, External‑Secrets, and Clusterpedia.

Teller

Teller was added to CNCF in April 2022, has 1.1K GitHub stars and over 25 contributors.

Its main goal is to give developers a secure way to use sensitive data without hard‑coding it in source code or misplacing it in files. Using a teller.yaml file, Teller can connect to secret stores such as Vault, Consul, AWS Secret Manager, Google Secret Manager, and retrieve secrets safely.

Teller also supports DevSecOps use cases in CI pipelines, providing secret redaction for files, logs, or application output.

OpenCost

OpenCost joined CNCF in June 2022, has 2.9K GitHub stars and 47 contributors.

OpenCost is a vendor‑neutral open‑source project for measuring and allocating infrastructure costs in Kubernetes environments. It originated from the cost‑allocation engine built by Kubecost.

The project supports custom pricing tables and integrates billing with major cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure, as well as on‑premise clusters.

OpenFunction

OpenFunction was added to CNCF in April 2022, has 865 GitHub stars and 25 contributors.

OpenFunction is an open‑source cloud‑native FaaS (Function‑as‑a‑Service) platform for building and delivering event‑driven workloads on Kubernetes. It leverages projects such as Tekton, KEDA, Knative, Dapr, and Shipwright to construct a complete FaaS stack.

One of its primary CRDs is a Function that defines how source code is built and how the function serves events. OpenFunction also allows custom CRDs to describe event sources, triggers, and event buses.

External‑Secrets

External‑Secrets joined CNCF in July 2022, has 1.9K GitHub stars and over 300 contributors.

The project synchronizes secrets from external secret stores into Kubernetes Secret objects, automatically updating the Kubernetes secrets when the external source changes, without manual intervention.

Clusterpedia

Clusterpedia entered CNCF in June 2022, has 497 GitHub stars and 35 contributors.

Clusterpedia acts as a Wikipedia for clusters: it synchronizes Kubernetes resources into its own database, enabling powerful cross‑cluster searches while remaining compatible with different resource versions.

Although some are still sandbox projects, these five tools have already made a positive impact on the community, as reflected by their GitHub activity. In 2022 CNCF added many valuable projects that are influencing the future of cloud computing. DevOps engineers should stay updated on CNCF projects, which are defining and leading the cloud‑native landscape.

References

[1] Teller: https://github.com/SpectralOps/Teller

[2] OpenCost: https://github.com/opencost/opencost

[3] OpenFunction: https://github.com/OpenFunction/OpenFunction

[4] External‑Secrets: https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets

[5] Clusterpedia: https://github.com/clusterpedia-io/clusterpedia

[6] Kubecost: https://kubecost.com/