To our incredible open source community,
Today, we’re announcing the sunset of the CNCF Community Cluster at the end of 2025. As Equinix Metal sunsets its offering, support for community initiatives like ours is also being phased out. As a result, we’ll begin a graceful shutdown of the Cluster services. While this marks the end of the Cluster, we look back with immense gratitude and look ahead with optimism for the future of cloud native open source infrastructure using alternatives such as those from our partner Oracle and others.
A Legacy of Support for Open Source
Launched in 2016, the CNCF Community Cluster was a pioneering initiative made possible by our partners and friends at Packet (later acquired by Equinix and rebranded as Equinix Metal). You can revisit its history in the original announcement and the Equinix Metal case study from that era.
For nearly a decade, the CNCF Community Infrastructure Lab (CIL) has provided open source developers with free access to cutting-edge computing resources, accelerating progress in cloud native technologies. By offering x86 and ARMv8 bare metal servers, it enabled essential workflows, from software builds and CI/CD pipelines to scale testing and demos for CNCF projects.Equinix Metal’s global infrastructure—including New York City, Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, and Tokyo—enabled maintainers to run workloads on-demand, leveraging the automation and consistency of major cloud providers without virtualization constraints.
Deepest Gratitude to Equinix Metal
We extend our sincere appreciation to the Packet and Equinix Metal teams for their years of generous support. This freely available infrastructure has empowered countless open source projects beyond cloud native, fueling innovation and enabling maintainers to push boundaries. None of this would have been possible without their contributions. Also, a special thank you to Zachary Smith and Ed Vielmetti for their support in the CNCF.
Looking Ahead: Alternative Infrastructure for Maintainers
While the CNCF Community Cluster is shutting down, CNCF project maintainers still have access to cloud infrastructure resources. If your project requires compute power, you can request services through the CNCF ServiceDesk:
🔗 CNCF Project Services & Hosted Tools
The CNCF Community Cluster will be phased out on the following schedule:
- Projects should shut down and migrate any of their resources to an alternative cloud platform (see see above for alternatives) by September 30, 2025.
- All remaining resources will be removed by CNCF staff the week after KubeCon North America, ending on November 21, 2025.
- The CNCF Community Cluster will be completely decommissioned on December 31, 2025.
The open source ecosystem thrives on resilience, collaboration, and shared support. While this chapter closes, we remain committed to helping maintainers find the necessary resources to continue innovating.
A heartfelt thank you to Equinix Metal and all the maintainers pushing the cloud native landscape forward.
💙 CNCF Team