The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to approve archiving the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) project.
SMI was created to provide a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes and a basic feature set for the most common service mesh use cases. It was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project in March 2020.
SMI is the fifth CNCF project to be archived. Open source projects have a lifecycle, and projects may become inactive for a variety of reasons. There are also cases where a project may no longer want to be supported by CNCF, maintainers and or the TOC.
“In CNCF, projects have a lifecycle and sometimes that includes archiving a project, especially as sandbox projects are meant for experimentation. It’s all really part of maintaining a healthy open source ecosystem,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Projects will naturally move through a lifecycle and can become less active or may no longer fit a certain use case. In the case of SMI, the maintainers have decided to consolidate efforts on a service mesh under the auspices of GAMMA under the Kubernetes SIG Network initiative.”
In July 2022, the SMI team updated the project blog site: Announcing SMI’s collaboration in the Gateway API GAMMA Initiative. No further work has happened under the SMI umbrella, and the SMI maintainers are recommending the SMI project for archival at this time and for folks to participate in the GAMMA initiative.
Once a project is archived:
- CNCF will no longer provide support for the project
- It is listed online as an archived project
- CNCF can provide services such as documentation updates to help transition users.
- Other CNCF marketing activities will no longer be provided for the project
The CNCF TOC would like to thank the SMI project maintainers and contributors for the important part they have played in advancing cloud native service mesh technology and standardization.
Learn more about the CNCF archiving process.