Posted on December 19, 2023

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept OpenFeature as a CNCF incubating project.

OpenFeature is an open specification that offers a vendor-agnostic, community-driven API for feature flagging, compatible with various feature flag management tools. Feature flags are a technique in software development that allows teams to enable, disable, or alter the behavior of certain features or code paths in a product or service without modifying the source code. 

The standardization of feature flags through OpenFeature unifies tools and vendors behind a common interface, helping avoid vendor lock-in at the code level and providing a framework for building extensions and integrations that can be shared across the community​​.

“Specifications fill a unique place in cloud native. They allow adopters to experience consistent development and integration patterns to achieve a uniform functionality across platforms. However they have more challenges in adoption due to the need for a reference implementation,” said Emily Fox, TOC Sponsor for OpenFeature and senior principle software engineer at Red Hat. “OpenFeature taps into its talented contributor pool who manage community developed SDKs for reference implementations that provide adopters with a variety of options to meet their needs.  Their commitment to collaboration for improving and expanding the specification will continue to allow the project to gain momentum as it begins its journey towards Graduation.”

Since joining the Sandbox in June 2022, OpenFeature has quickly gained support from vendors including LaunchDarkly, Split, CloudBees, and Flagsmith and end users including eBay, Google, SAP, and Spotify. It has also seen a 700% increase in repository stars, 350% increase in forks, and a 627% increase in Slack channel members.

Main Components 

Notable Milestones:

OpenFeature is now focused on driving further standardization – building on OpenFeature’s existing definition for a flag evaluation SDK, the project is exploring two further standards – a wire protocol for remote flag evaluation and a standard flag definition format.

“Reflecting on the past year at OpenFeature, I’m stoked about the project evolution. Our specs are solid, and our SDKs cover ground like never before. Huge shoutout to our amazing community of contributors! As we look ahead, I’m pumped about the wire protocol initiative. The future looks bright, and we can’t wait to see where OpenFeature goes next!”

Thomas Poignant, technical committee member

“​​Over the last year, I learned a lot about feature flagging and saw a huge interest from the community on the topic. As a maintainer of several OpenFeature projects, I am excited about the news on the project’s Incubation status. I believe OpenFeature will play a key role in next-generation software, enhancing interoperability with standard APIs and giving a smooth developer experience on feature delivery.”

Kavindu Dodanduwa – maintainer of Java, Go and flagd

“I joined the project after we were looking into which feature flagging solution we can use in our customer project. Finding out about OpenFeature helped us making a decision way faster as we could try solutions while still having a stable feature flagging API in our code bases. The integration into the CNCF landscape like e.g. Kubernetes or OpenTelemetry really helps operationalize cloud native feature flagging. I am really looking forward into continuing the evolution of OpenFeature to make feature flagging help projects and organizations get the most value out of feature flagging with a great experience.”

Lukas Reining, technical committee member and JS Maintainer

“We’ve had a great response and effort from such a wide variety of contributors; flag providers like Flagsmith and LaunchDarkly, large organisations like eBay and Spotify, wider ecosystem folk like Dynatrace, hobbyists, people scratching their own itch, everyone!”

Ben Rometsch, governance board member

“It’s been a truly remarkable year learning alongside the OpenFeature project. Watching it flourish and become a trusted tool in production for many organizations has been amazing to see. The project’s commitment to open, platform-agnostic feature flagging aligns deeply with our values and aspirations at DevCycle. I am personally thrilled and proud of what the OpenFeature community has achieved, reaching the CNCF Incubation milestone. I’m committed to helping with its growth and establish it as the go-to standard for feature flagging in the industry.”

Jonathan Norris, co-founder and CTO, Devcycle

As a CNCF-hosted project, OpenFeature is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach. OpenFeature joins incubating technologies Backstage, Buildpacks, cert-manager, Chaos Mesh, CloudEvents, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, CubeFS, Dapr, Dragonfly, Emissary-Ingress, Falco, gRPC, in-toto, Keptn, Keycloak, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Kyverno, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenKruise, OpenMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, Thanos, and Volcano. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.