werf project turns 9!

It’s hard to believe now but werf, a CNCF Sandbox project today, was started more than 9 years ago already.

Here’s the first public commit in the project’s repo dated January 2016:

At that time, it was written in Ruby(!), was not focused on Kubernetes, and, generally speaking, wasn’t anything like it is today. However, we’ll skip the werf history and introductory part in this post (those interested might read this blog post instead) by shifting our focus to the latest achievements of the project and its community.

Let’s start with a brief overview of new releases and software updates introduced in werf since last January.

Last year’s werf updates

In January 2024, we introduced a new format for displaying Kubernetes deployment progress, logs, and events. Together with the --atomic (--auto-rollback) mode support for the werf converge command, it was implemented as part of a bigger overhaul of Nelm, the new werf’s deployment engine and our Helm 3 alternative.

Deployment progress status in Nelm

In April, werf v2.0 was released, enabling Nelm as the default and the only deployment engine. It brought numerous new major features and improvements to werf — you can find the highlights of werf v2 in the official announcement. With this release, we also switched to semantic versioning aligned with our plans to release a new major version of werf every year.

A few releases followed in May-July, bringing prominent new changes to werf, such as more flexible deploy dependency annotation, improved release namespace management, and intermediate build-only images.

At the end of the year, we’ve seen more werf releases featuring support for build-time secrets (for Dockerfiles and Stapel used with Docker and Buildah) and better SSH-based workflow.

Meanwhile, an early Nelm CLI implementation was contributed to the project, followed by our Nelm CLI design proposal, which is open for community suggestions.

From the Nelm CLI design proposal

Finally, we started the year 2025 with another step in improving werf documentation: making the Getting Started guide, which covers various CI/CD setups, even more powerful and covering more Buildah use cases.

Community activities and other events

While development is essential, building a project, especially an Open Source one, always goes hand in hand with other activities. Here are some of those we’d like to anticipate for the last year.

In March, werf featured its kiosk at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 Project Pavilion in Paris. It was a pure pleasure to meet the community and discuss various feedback and thoughts!

werf kiosk at KubeCon Europe 2024

In May, we presented a CNCF webinar “From improving Helm to developing Nelm: the evolution of deployments in werf,” which revealed the story behind Nelm and its signature features:

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In July, while the main repo of werf reached 4000 GitHub stars, the newly created Nelm repo celebrated its first 200 stars.

Following the tech crowd, in November, we launched a Bluesky account for werf, @werf.io, and have been happy to post there since then! Join us if you’re around.

Obviously, there were numerous writings about werf during the last year. Here are two remarkable articles created by the Cloud Native community we’d like to highlight (and thank the authors!):

• “Finally, a viable Helm Replacement” by Piotr Zaniewski
• “Werf : Deploy or Not Deploy, There is No Try — Part 1” (it’s available in French as well) by Ivan Beauté

This year was also prominent thanks to surpassing the 10,000+ threshold of active projects using werf. By active project in this sense, we refer to each Git repo where werf was applied at least once during the last month. This number grew to 15,000 at the end of 2024.

What’s ahead

It’s been a great year for werf, which also laid the foundation for the further development. Our plans for 2025 include:

• releasing werf v3 that will feature SOPS integration for secrets, accelerated Stapel builder, better Git submodules handling, new functions for working with numerous apps of the same type, and improvements for bundles;
• enhancing Nelm with a CLI built according to our design proposal, library actions and Flux integration, patching rendered chart resources on the fly, and tracking the most popular Kubernetes customer resources.

Interested in seeing these and many other new features coming to werf?Here are some of the official resources that will help to stay informed:

• werf announcements on GitHub
• werf Telegram chat
• @werf.io on Bluesky