Harbor, one of the many open source projects that originated in China, has become CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) incubator project.

Harbor is an open source cloud-native registry that stores, signs, and scans container images for vulnerabilities. The project was created by

The projected was accepted to the Cloud Native Sandbox in 2018 when VMware donated the project to CNCF.

Ever since its acceptance into CNCF, the project has been evolving to address including technical dept and laying out a roadmap for the project based on community feedback.

So what does it take for a project to graduate to incubation? CNCF explains that in order to be considered for incubation a project must show certain growth and maturity.

• Production usage: There must be users of the project that have deployed it to production environments and depend on its functionality for their business needs. We’ve worked closely with a number of large organizations leveraging Harbor the last number of years, so: check!
• Healthy maintainer team: There must be a healthy number of members on the team that can approve and accept new contributions to the project from the community. We have a number of maintainers that founded the project and continue to work on it full time, in addition to new maintainers joining the party: check!
• Healthy flow of contributions: The project must have a continuous and ongoing flow of new features and code being submitted and accepted into the codebase. Harbor released v1.6 in the summer of 2018, and we’re on the verge of releasing v1.7: check!
• CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) evaluated the proposal from the Harbor team and concluded that we had met all the required criteria. It is both deeply humbling and an honor to be in the company of other highly-respected incubated projects like gRPC, Fluentd, Envoy, Jaeger, Rook, NATS, and more.

Harbor solves common challenges by delivering trust, compliance, performance, and interoperability. It fills a gap for organizations and applications that cannot use a public or cloud-based registry, or want a consistent experience across clouds.