As part of a new Archiving Process initiated earlier this year, CNCF announced today that the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to archive the rkt project.

All open source projects are subject to a lifecycle and can become less active for a number of reasons. In rkt’s case, despite its initial popularity following its creation in December 2014, and contribution to CNCF in March 2017, end user adoption has severely declined. The CNCF is also home to other container runtime projects: containerd and CRI-O, and while the rkt project played an important part in the early days of cloud native adoption, in recent times user adoption has trended away from rkt towards these other projects. Furthermore, project activity and the number of contributors has also steadily declined over time, along with unpatched CVEs.

At CNCF, incubation stage projects are expected to show end user growth, maintain a healthy number of committers, and demonstrate a substantial ongoing flow of contributions, among other things. For projects that no longer meet these requirements, a proposal can be submitted to the TOC to archive a project. Once a project is archived:

CNCF will no longer provide full services for the project, except transition services such as documentation updates to help transition users

Trademarks of archived projects are still hosted neutrally by the Linux Foundation

CNCF marketing and event activities will no longer be provided for the project

Any project that has been archived can be reactivated into CNCF through the normal project proposal process. The archived project will be hosted under the Linux Foundation and maintainers are welcome to continue working on the project if they wish to do so.

The CNCF TOC would like to thank the rkt project maintainers and contributors for the important part they have played in the development and evolution of cloud native technology.

Learn more about the CNCF archiving process.