We are thrilled to announce that Apicurio Registry has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project! This is a major milestone for the project and the community, and we couldn’t be more excited about what it means for the future of open-source schema and API registry management.

What This Means

Joining the CNCF means that Apicurio Registry now has a vendor-neutral home under one of the most respected foundations in the cloud-native ecosystem. The CNCF hosts projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and many others that have become the backbone of modern infrastructure.

For Apicurio Registry, CNCF membership brings:

  • Vendor-neutral governance — ensuring the project’s long-term independence and community-driven evolution
  • Greater visibility — making it easier for organizations evaluating open-source alternatives to proprietary registries to discover and adopt Apicurio
  • Community growth — leveraging CNCF’s infrastructure and reach to expand the contributor base beyond its current roots
  • Ecosystem alignment — deepening integration with the broader cloud-native landscape

Why CNCF?

Apicurio Registry already integrates with several CNCF projects:

  • Strimzi (Incubating) — serving as a schema registry for Apache Kafka and using Kafka as a storage backend
  • Kubernetes (Graduated) — with a dedicated operator and ConfigMap-based storage via KubernetesOps
  • xRegistry (Sandbox) — working toward alignment with the xRegistry specification as a production-grade implementation
  • gRPC (Incubating) — managing Protocol Buffer schemas
  • CloudEvents (Graduated) — through extensible artifact type support
  • Argo CD / Flux — enabling GitOps workflows through KubernetesOps storage

The CNCF is the natural home for a project that sits at the intersection of API governance, data streaming, and cloud-native infrastructure.

The Journey

This acceptance is the result of years of work from the Apicurio community. Some highlights since the project’s previous application in 2023:

  • Apicurio Registry 3.0 GA shipped in June 2024, bringing a redesigned data model, new REST API, and rewritten KafkaSQL storage
  • Apicurio Studio was deprecated and merged into Registry 3.1.0, consolidating the project into a single focused product
  • AI-native capabilities were introduced, including A2A Agent Cards, MCP Server integration, and LLM artifact types
  • Custom artifact type extensibility allows users to define their own artifact types
  • The project now has 768+ GitHub stars, 312 forks, and 114 contributors from 30+ organizations
  • Production deployments power IBM Event Streams and Red Hat Application Foundations
  • Contributors from organizations like Bloomberg, Amazon, Volvo, Axual, and Riot Games have helped shape the project

Filling a Gap in the CNCF Landscape

There is currently no other production-grade, multi-format schema and API registry among CNCF projects. Apicurio Registry fills that gap by providing:

  • Support for all major schema formats — OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL, Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema, and more
  • Pluggable storage backends — PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, GitOps, and KubernetesOps
  • Confluent Schema Registry API compatibility — enabling drop-in replacement of proprietary alternatives
  • Client libraries with serializer/deserializer support for Kafka, Pulsar, and NATS, plus SDKs in Java, Go, TypeScript, and Python
  • A governance engine with hierarchical rules for validity and compatibility enforcement
  • A Kubernetes operator for lifecycle management
  • A web-based UI for artifact management

All of this under the Apache License 2.0.

What’s Next

Joining the CNCF is a beginning, not a destination. Our roadmap includes:

  • xRegistry specification alignment — becoming a production-grade reference implementation
  • Expanded AI agent ecosystem — building on our A2A, MCP, and LLM artifact support
  • Performance and scalability improvements — caching, OpenTelemetry tracing, and optimization
  • MySQL storage support
  • Continued SDK and CLI development

Get Involved

Now is the perfect time to get involved with Apicurio Registry:

We want to thank everyone who has contributed to Apicurio Registry over the years — the maintainers, the contributors, the users, and the organizations that have trusted the project in production. This milestone belongs to the entire community.

Welcome to the CNCF, Apicurio Registry!