Strengthening the Cloud-Native Ecosystem Through Upstream Collaboration

Open source thrives on shared ownership, open governance, and collaboration across companies and communities. At Broadcom, our approach to cloud-native innovation is rooted in contributing as maintainers, contributors, and collaborators within the communities that evolve the technologies modern platforms depend on. 

Earlier this year, we shared our broader plans¹ for deeper engagement with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community, outlining how our engineering teams are working upstream across critical Kubernetes projects in collaboration with existing maintainers and contributors to support long-term ecosystem health.

That work spans several foundational projects, including Cluster API (CAPI), etcd, Harbor, and Velero.  Each addresses different layers of the Kubernetes operational lifecycle, from cluster lifecycle management to control plane reliability and data protection.

Today, we’re excited to share progress on that journey, including our ongoing work with the community toward bringing Velero into the CNCF Sandbox, as well as continued collaboration with the etcd contributor community.

These efforts represent collaboration with the broader ecosystem, reflecting a shared commitment to upstream contribution, collective stewardship, and strengthening cloud-native infrastructure together.

Advancing Velero Toward CNCF Stewardship

As part of this continued engagement, Broadcom has contributed Velero, the Kubernetes native backup, restore, and migration project, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project. This marks an important step in the project’s evolution toward open, community-driven governance.

Velero received the required approval from the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), reflecting strong support from the community for bringing the project under vendor-neutral CNCF stewardship.

“As organizations scale their cloud native workloads, the focus is shifting from simple orchestration to long-term resilience and data management,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “Velero provides a vital layer for backup and disaster recovery, ensuring that stateful applications remain protected. By joining the CNCF Sandbox, Velero gains a vendor-neutral home to foster community collaboration and growth.”

Velero has evolved through years of collaboration across maintainers, contributors, and users, helping platform teams protect cluster state, support disaster recovery workflows, and move applications across Kubernetes environments.

Today, many platform teams rely on Velero to:

• Protect cluster state and persistent data
• Enable disaster recovery and rollback workflows
• Migrate workloads across clusters and environments

Bringing Velero into CNCF governance represents the next step in its community evolution and expanding participation, supporting open technical direction, and reinforcing long-term sustainability under shared stewardship.

As a CNCF Sandbox project², Velero will continue to evolve through the contributions of maintainers, contributors, and users working together to strengthen data protection and resilience for Kubernetes environments.

Working with the Cluster API (CAPI) Community on Kubernetes Lifecycle Management

Alongside projects like Velero, Broadcom engineers continue to collaborate with the Cluster API (CAPI) community, which plays a key role in automating the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters.

Our work with the CAPI community focuses on helping improve cluster lifecycle operations, including areas such as:

• Cluster provisioning and lifecycle automation
• Upgrade orchestration and node lifecycle management
• Operational consistency across environments

These efforts help platform teams manage Kubernetes clusters more predictably at scale while reinforcing a common set of lifecycle patterns across the ecosystem³.

Like many CNCF projects, Cluster API⁴ continues to evolve through the collaboration of maintainers, contributors, and operators working together to improve how Kubernetes infrastructure is managed in real-world environments.

Collaborating with the etcd Community on Core Kubernetes Reliability

Alongside the Velero effort, Broadcom engineers have continued working alongside the etcd maintainer and contributor community on tooling, particularly etcd diagnosis and recovery tools, aimed at improving operational visibility and recovery^5,6 for Kubernetes control planes.

Because etcd⁷ plays a foundational role within Kubernetes, maintaining its reliability is a shared responsibility across the ecosystem. Recent collaborative work has focused on helping operators more easily:

• Understand cluster health
• Identify potential issues
• Recover from failure scenarios

These improvements reflect joint efforts between contributors working to improve the day-to-day operational experience of running Kubernetes at scale, benefiting the broader community of operators and platform teams.

Efforts like these, whether advancing project stewardship through CNCF or collaborating on core reliability improvements, reflect a broader approach to how we engage upstream.

Why Community-Driven Contribution Matters to Broadcom

For Broadcom, working upstream is part of how we participate in and support the communities behind the technologies we rely on every day.

Collaborating directly with maintainers and contributors allows our engineers to engage with real operational challenges in the open, improving core infrastructure in ways that benefit both the broader ecosystem and the platforms built on top of it.

Contributing at the source helps address issues collectively rather than downstream, reducing fragmentation and long-term maintenance complexity while supporting healthier, more sustainable projects.

Just as importantly, working in the open enables shared learning. Feedback loops between users, maintainers, and contributors help shape better technical decisions and strengthen project resilience over time.

Continuing the Journey

The work underway with Velero and etcd reflects an ongoing commitment to collaborating within the cloud-native ecosystem.

As Kubernetes continues to evolve across private cloud and enterprise environments, we look forward to continuing to work alongside CNCF maintainers, contributors, and users. Through ongoing collaboration, we aim to learn together, contribute where we can, and support the open-source foundations that modern infrastructure depends on.

We’re grateful to be part of this community and excited to continue building together.