Uber donates Cadence Workflow to CNCF: The next big leap for the open source project

NetApp congratulates the Cadence Workflow project and Uber, its original creators, on achieving Sandbox status under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! This milestone ushers in a new era for Cadence, delivering many benefits to users and strengthening its position as a foundational technology for modern microservices architectures and the emerging field of agentic AI.

What is Cadence?

Cadence is an open source, distributed workflow orchestration engine that enables developers to build and manage scalable, reliable applications. As part of the CNCF projects ecosystem, Cadence empowers teams with streamlined automation, advanced error handling, and strong scalability required for modern microservices environments.

Cadence’s journey from Uber Engineering into CNCF

Originally developed and open sourced by Uber, Cadence has powered mission-critical workflows for some of the world’s largest companies. Uber’s recent decision to donate Cadence to the CNCF ensures community-driven growth, transparent governance, and a stable foundation for open source success.

This move paves the way for broader adoption, greater sustainability, and ongoing innovation as the project grows under CNCF’s guidance. We thank Uber for this significant contribution to the open source community.

“At NetApp, we believe open source foundations like CNCF offer the most sustainable path for long-term open source project success. Foundation stewardship ensures ongoing availability under a stable license and guarantees open governance, with project direction shaped by the contributing community. Time and again, we believe this model has delivered superior outcomes for users compared to projects controlled by a single company,” says Ben Slater, VP and GM for NetApp Instaclustr.

Read Uber’s official announcement and learn more on the CNCF landscape.

Benefits of CNCF projects for open source innovation

Joining the CNCF as a Sandbox project fosters community engagement, improves transparency, and accelerates Cadence’s maturity. The CNCF project maturity model moves projects from Sandbox through to full Graduation, with each stage driving broader adoption and innovation. Given the extensive existing deployments of Cadence in many large-scale environments, we expect to see Cadence move smoothly through these stages.

We believe a key factor of progression through the CNCF maturity model will be broadening the base of contributors to Cadence and NetApp intends to play our part in this. We have been working closely with the Uber’s Cadence team since we first released Instaclustr for Cadence in 2022 and have made multiple contributions to the Cadence code base—like the OIDC Middleware Implementation—alongside contributing to community engagement aspects of the project. We intend to continue these contributions as Cadence matures in the CNCF.

Beyond our open source contributions, NetApp aims to continue investing in Instaclustr for Cadence—to deliver the simplest, most reliable way to run true open source Cadence for your applications. We believe Cadence will play a central role in architecture for the coming agentic AI revolution, and we will be focusing on making it easy to use establishing Cadence as the reliable, orchestrating layer for AI-driven actions.

Why choose Cadence?

• Built for modern, containerized application environments
• Trusted by enterprises across industries
• Backed by a growing, diverse contributor community
• Flexible, supporting both cloud-native and hybrid deployments
• Designed for the evolving needs of agentic AI and scalable automation

Ready to explore Cadence Workflow? Start your free trial on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform and see how CNCF project can power your organization’s next big leap into automation.

If you have more questions about our Cadence offering or this announcement, then please contact us—we’re always happy to chat about exciting open source projects!