Cloud Native Buildpacks 2021 Roadmap
As we turn the page on a new year, the Buildpacks project would like to share our assessment of last year, and our plans for the coming months. 2020 was challenging, but we’re proud to say that we still accomplished a great deal and positioned ourselves well for another productive year.
Our north star last year was coming of age, and we prioritized work that helped the project mature and become production ready. We established a well defined release cadence, improved reproducibility and distribution of Buildpacks, and the CNCF promoted the project to Incubation level.
Now that we’ve come of age, we want to make Buildpacks more accessible to the broader Cloud Native ecosystem. The 2021 roadmap theme is: Sustainable Growth.
We will focus on projects that help grow our community, contributors, and adopters. We’ll prioritize projects that make Buildpacks more accessible to a wider audience and we’ll try to solve problems that have prevented some users from adopting Buildpacks.
Growing our community
Last year, we sent a clear signal to the industry that Buildpacks are ready for production. Our technology has been adopted by a diverse set of companies and projects. Now we want to bring those adopters into the fold, and encourage them to join our community.
In the early part of 2021, we launched the Buildpack Registry, which allows adopters to publish their buildpacks and end users to discover them. We’ll continue making the registry better this year. We’ll also prioritize work to improve our documentation, and we’ll block releases if our documentation isn’t good enough.
We’re also aiming to define a better vision for how buildpacks fit into the broader Cloud Native ecosystem. For many in our community, it’s not obvious how Buildpacks work with Docker, Kubernetes, and other technologies that sit alongside our project in the CNCF landscape. One of our goals for the year is to deliver an out-of-the-box experience that works well with these tools.
Growing our team
The Buildpacks project has ten maintainers and more than a dozen contributors. We receive contributions from many different companies, but we think we can do better. The majority of Buildpacks adopters have not participated in our RFC process or joined in our design discussions, which may indicate that we haven’t been as welcoming as we could. This year, we want to diversify our contributor base in every dimension. We want to ensure that we remain inclusive, and we want to gain team members from different corners of the industry and from around the globe.
As part of this, we want to make it easier to understand the project and how to contribute to it, which is why we’re aiming to refactor our specification. The Buildpacks spec is our foundation, but after several years of iteration, it’s become confusing to those who read it for the first time. We hope that revisiting the spec will both encourage new adopters and make it easier to contribute.
Growing our users
Above all this year, we want to continue growing our user base. We’ll do this by shipping great features like Stack Buildpacks, and giving users more configuration “escape hatches” like Inline Buildpacks. These highly requested features will satisfy use cases that have hindered adopters in the past.
One of our more aggressive goals is to improve the development inner-loop for Buildpacks users. We’re aiming to define a Test Buildpack API, which would allow users to run their application tests in a buildpacks-based environment. Similarly, we hope to bring some of the existing patterns for developing in a buildpacks-based container into the buildpack specification.
We hope these goals will help the project, the people, and the technology behind Buildpacks to grow at a sustainable pace. And we believe we’re best poised to make progress when we gather together as a community. If you’re reading this, we want to hear from you!
To learn more about the 2021 Cloud Native Buildpacks roadmap and provide your input, see our Community Github repository. Or join the conversation on Slack. We’d love to hear your feedback about any of the items on our roadmap.
