The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is hosting KubeCon + Cloud Native Con this week in Salt Lake City, UT, and during the event, it announced the graduation of two of its projects: cert-manager and Dapr.

Cert-manager is an open source certificate management platform that helps developers automate issuance and renewal of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) certificates.

It was created in 2017 at Jetstack (now owned by Venafi, a CyberArk company), accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in November 2020, and moved to the CNCF Incubators in 2022. At the time of its graduation, cert-manager had over 450 contributors, 200 releases, and 500 million downloads per month. 

“By making it easier for developers to obtain, manage, and automate security certificates, cert-manager helps ensure applications remain secure throughout their lifecycles, making the ecosystem more secure as a whole,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. “We’re thrilled to see the project reach this milestone and look forward to it continuing to improve the cloud native security space.”

The other graduated project, Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime), is a runtime for building distributed applications. It was created by Microsoft in 2019, and accepted into the CNCF Incubator in November 2021. Today, it has over 3,700 contributors and has over 70 million downloads. 

“In today’s competitive environment it’s more important than ever for organizations to be able to ship reliable and scalable applications quickly,” said Aniszczyk. “Dapr provides a comprehensive solution for developing edge and cloud native applications, saving developers valuable time and freeing them to focus on innovating.” 

Both projects integrate with many other CNCF projects, such as Envoy, Istio, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and SPIFFE.

Jaeger v2 released

Additionally, the distributed tracing platform Jaeger — one of the first projects to ever graduate from the CNCF — has reached a major milestone with the release of v2. 

This release marks an important architectural change in that the platform is now based on the OpenTelemetry Collector. According to the CNCF, this architectural change made sense because there was already some overlap and both Jaeger and OpenTelemetry Collector often utilized each other’s code.  

“Collector supports receivers for legacy Jaeger formats implemented by importing Jaeger packages. And Jaeger reuses Collector’s receivers and data model converters. Because of this synergy, it’s been our goal for a while to bring the two projects closer,” the Jaeger maintainers wrote in a blog post. 

Some key features and benefits brought about in Jaeger v2 include:

  • Native support for the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) data format 
  • Batch data processing
  • Implementation of the same configuration and deployment model as the OpenTelemetry Collector
  • All core features of the OpenTelemetry Collector, like auth, cert reloading, internal monitoring, and z-pages
  • Access to OpenTelemetry Collector extensions
  • The ability to perform tail-based sampling