K8gb becomes a CNCF incubating project

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Kubernetes Global Balancer (K8gb) as a CNCF incubating project.

About K8gb

K8gb is an open source, cloud native Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) solution designed specifically for Kubernetes. It solves the critical challenge of ensuring application availability and disaster recovery across multiple Kubernetes clusters and geographical regions. By leveraging standard Kubernetes APIs, CoreDNS and external DNS, K8gb automates traffic management and ensures seamless failover capabilities.

K8gb’s Milestones and Ecosystem Development

Since K8gb was accepted as a CNCF sandbox project in March 2021, the project has seen a multitude of accomplishments and has solidified its role in global traffic management.

K8gb has seen significant adoption across global organizations in both fintech and cloud consulting, including Portugal’s largest privately owned bank, Millennium bcp. By adopting K8gb, the bank enhanced their digital banking resiliency, dramatically reducing their recovery times and now holds a 99.99% service uptime across critical banking applications.

K8gb continues to show healthy community engagement and interest with an LFX Insights Health Score of 72 out of 100. The Health Score evaluates a project’s overall trustworthiness across four major domains: development, contributors, security, and popularity. Since its start in the CNCF sandbox, K8gb has 239 contributors with 73% contributing quarter over quarter and 105 contributing organizations. It has also earned 1197 GitHub stars and has had 149 GitHub forks, a 71% increase over the past year. Additionally, LFX Insights estimates the value of software to be more than $2M.

“The K8gb community is proud to see the project advance to incubation status. Our goal has always been to simplify GSLB for the Kubernetes community, and this milestone validates the hard work of each of our maintainers and contributors. We look forward to deepening our integration within the CNCF ecosystem and continuing to solve complex multi-cluster networking challenges.”

— Yury Tsarev, K8gb Founder and Core Maintainer

The CNCF TOC provides technical leadership to the cloud native projects and community. It defines and maintains the foundation’s technical vision, approves new projects, and stewards them across maturity levels. The TOC also aligns projects within the overall ecosystem, sets cross-cutting standards and best practices, and works with end users to ensure long-term sustainability. As part of its principles, the TOC evaluates and supports projects as they meet requirements for incubation and continue progressing toward graduation.

“K8gb addresses a fundamental gap in multi-cluster networking by providing a vendor-neutral, Kubernetes-native approach to global load balancing. Over the past five years, the project has demonstrated impressive technical growth and community engagement, so it is with great pleasure that the TOC congratulates K8gb on becoming the newest incubating project. We anticipate continued innovation as it continues to scale in this new stage of maturity.”

— Karena Angell, CNCF TOC Sponsor

Main Components:

K8gb’s main components consist of the following:

GSLB Custom Resource: Defines the declarative API for configuring global traffic management across clusters.

K8gb Operator: The core cluster logic that manages GSLB resources, checks application health, and coordinates traffic strategies.

Kubernetes Native Health Checks: Relies directly on pod liveness and readiness probes to make intelligent routing decisions.

Integrations: Ingress and Gateway API: Connects Kubernetes Ingress and Gateway API resources to DNS-based global traffic management across clusters while remaining agnostic to the underlying controller.

Embedded CoreDNS: Uses the CNCF-graduated CoreDNS engine to serve dynamic DNS responses.

ExternalDNS: Native support for ExternalDNS, handling zone delegation and integration with external cloud native DNS providers.

Crossplane Global Control Plane: Integrates with graduated project, Crossplane, to provision and manage multi-cluster application infrastructure and declarative global load balancing.

K8gb’s Roadmap

Looking ahead, the K8gb community is focused on a few enhancements, including support for complex multi-region traffic routing, advanced observability and metrics for GSLB configurations, expansion of the ecosystem integration list, and deeper support for service mesh technologies.

As a CNCF-hosted project, K8gb 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. K8gb joins incubating technologies Backstage, Buildpacks, Chaos Mesh, Container Network Interface (CNI), Contour, Cortex, CubeFS, Emissary-Ingress, gRPC, in-toto, Keptn, Keycloak, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, KubeVela, KubeVirt, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenFeature, OpenKruise, OpenMetrics, Operator Framework, Thanos, and Volcano.

For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.

For the latest updates and detailed roadmap, please visit: https://www.k8gb.io/latest/

To learn more about how to contribute to K8gb, visit k8gb.io or explore the GitHub repository.