Velero Joins the CNCF Sandbox

We are excited to announce that Velero has been accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project. This marks a significant milestone for the project, placing Velero under vendor-neutral, community-driven governance alongside other foundational cloud native tools.

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) accepted the Sandbox application, and the transition was formally announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam.

What This Means

Joining the CNCF Sandbox means Velero is now governed by the same open, vendor-neutral principles that guide projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. In practice, this means:

• Vendor-neutral governance: No single company controls the project roadmap. Decisions are made through consensus-based processes with supermajority voting.
• Community-driven development: The project’s direction is shaped by its maintainers and contributors, who represent multiple organizations.
• Long-term sustainability: CNCF provides a neutral home that ensures the project’s continuity regardless of changes in any single company’s priorities.

For existing Velero users, nothing changes in how you use the tool. Velero continues to operate at the Kubernetes API layer, providing backup, restore, disaster recovery, and migration capabilities for your clusters and applications.

Our Journey

Velero’s journey began at Heptio, the Kubernetes company founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, where it was originally known as Ark. After VMware acquired Heptio in 2019, the project continued to grow under VMware’s stewardship. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the decision was made to contribute Velero to the CNCF, ensuring the project’s future under community governance.

Throughout these transitions, one thing has remained constant: a growing and engaged open source community. Today, Velero has over 10,000 GitHub stars, 1,500+ forks, 500M+ Docker Hub pulls, and is used by organizations across industries for Kubernetes data protection.

We are grateful to Broadcom for contributing Velero to the CNCF and to everyone who has contributed to the project over the years.

Current Maintainers

Velero is maintained by engineers from multiple organizations, reflecting the project’s vendor-neutral nature:

What’s Next

Joining the CNCF Sandbox is the beginning of a new chapter for Velero. Here is what we are focused on:

• Growing the community: We want more contributors, more adopters, and more voices shaping the project’s direction. Whether you are a user, operator, or developer, there is a place for you in the Velero community.
• Strengthening the project: We are continuing to improve Velero’s core capabilities around backup performance, data protection, and ecosystem integration.
• Path to Incubation: Our goal is to demonstrate the community health, adoption, and maturity needed to advance to CNCF Incubation status.

Get Involved

We welcome contributions of all kinds – code, documentation, bug reports, feature requests, and feedback.

• Slack: Join #velero-users and #velero-dev on Kubernetes Slack
• GitHub: github.com/velero-io/velero
• Community Meetings: We hold bi-weekly community meetings alternating between US/Europe and US/Asia-friendly time zones. See the community page for details.
• LinkedIn: Follow us at Project Velero
• Twitter/X: @projectvelero
• Contributing: Check out our contribution guide to get started.

We are excited about this new chapter and look forward to building the future of Kubernetes data protection together with the community.