The Future of Keptn

[thschue]

Hello Keptn Community!

As you may have noticed, things have quieted down around Keptn since the primary maintaining organization stopped allocating resources to the project. After informing the Governance Committee (@salaboy, @AnaMMedina21, and me), we began exploring options to find a sustainable path forward.

Now, it's time to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve accomplished with Keptn.

Originally, Keptn was described by one adopter as a "codified implementation of the SRE handbook." Its quality gating mechanisms, leveraging SLIs and SLOs, introduced a promising approach to improving application delivery and detecting issues early. Over time, many integrations were built, and Keptn grew to include features for deploying and promoting services across environments. The project successfully moved from the CNCF Sandbox to the Incubation stage—an exciting milestone in its journey.

However, as the cloud-native ecosystem evolved, it became challenging to integrate newer, more declarative, Git-driven workflows (particularly GitOps) into the existing architecture. We explored ways to modernize Keptn’s capabilities while staying true to its core principles. This led to the creation of the lifecycle-toolkit—a set of Kubernetes controllers for performing evaluations, tasks, and analyses directly on the cluster, where deployments happen. We also worked on standardizing metrics consumption with the metrics server and integrated it with major observability providers.

On behalf of the Governance Committee, I thank everyone who contributed to Keptn—contributors, maintainers, mentees, users, and champions. Your engagement and support over the years have been invaluable.

That said, the project is no longer positioned to uphold the expectations of an incubating CNCF project—particularly in terms of active maintainership and ongoing development. We believe a healthy open source project must evolve and aspire toward graduation—goals that are currently out of reach for Keptn.

We’ve spoken with individuals and organizations about potentially taking over the project, but unfortunately, those efforts did not lead to a sustainable handover.

Therefore, we’ve raised our concerns with the CNCF in this issue and are considering archiving the project.

If you or your organization are interested in taking over maintainership of Keptn, please reach out to Ana, Mauricio, or me to discuss possible next steps.

Best,
Thomas

for the Keptn Governance Committee