Health of Carvel project

[dims]

Looks like we have a crisis at hand in the Carvel project with Broadcom/VMware laying off the entire team working on the project. Please see:

Context:

• https://x.com/carvel_dev/status/1787871678942302297
• https://hackmd.io/G8dN30WvQl-8Sirnp8AgRA?view#May-8-2024-Agenda
• https://carvel.devstats.cncf.io/d/66/developer-activity-counts-by-companies?orgId=1&var-period_name=Last%20year&var-metric=contributions&var-repogroup_name=All&var-country_name=All&var-companies=All

Question is how do we get them help?

[krook]

Additional view into orgs and contributors in the Insights Beta: https://insights.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/foundation/cncf/reports/organizations?project=carvel&repository=&routedFrom=Github

[microwavables]

For more clarity - We have only 3 maintainers left from Broadcom on the project. The rest of the team has been removed.

[cppforlife]

Carvel project with Broadcom/VMware laying off the entire team

Hello folks, I'm Dmitriy -- one of the long time members of the Carvel team (also a Broadcom employee). You'll find my name (dkalinin) popping up on #carvel channel in k8s slack quite frequently.

It is true and very unfortunate that several of our team members were layed off. This is always hard =(. I want to send a huge thank you to them here for all of the contributions -- it made Carvel project and our community what it is today. It's been a pleasure working with y'all ❤️ (I won't mention them here directly as it's not my place to share their news).

I do want to note that several existing Carvel team members (who are Broadcom employees; as was mentioned above -- 3, not including myself) will continue to contribute to Carvel project as part of their regular day jobs. Team member changes always has influence on any project but I want to reaffirm that we are continuing to build and use Carvel to help us solve what we think are important problems (and of course we also are continuing to heavily use it within Broadcom).

[dims]

@cppforlife please keep us updated. thanks! thanks @microwavables as well

[microwavables]

@dims https://x.com/carvel_dev/status/1788259119595454697

[renuy]

Thanks @dims for raising this. A correction though, not all of the team has been impacted. We still have few key members who would continue to maintain and support Carvel and its community.
Having said that, I would like to use this issue as an opportunity to call out to the community to come support Carvel. We have processes defined for onboarding maintainers and the existing members are committed to mentoring new contributors and growing the community. We have, in fact, onboarded new members recently (external).
Any suggestions on how we can make this a smoother process is also welcome.
Do catch the previous community meeting posted above by @microwavables to know more on what was discussed.

[angellk]

@renuy @microwavables @cppforlife please provide an update here in August outlining how maintainer and project growth is going cc: @dims

[renuy]

@angellk

Maintainers:
We had 10 maintainers a few months back(before Jan 2024), majority of whom were from VMWare by Broadcom.
As of today we have 12 maintainers with a fair amount of non-VMWare members. This is the update maintainers list. Also updated the non-contributing members to emeritus status.
Contributions:
The maintainers count has seen an overall increase. The active contributors count is showing a reducing trend. Some of the maintainers are now in the "contributors drifting away" list. Active Contributors are decreased by 10%.
Activities:
The github activities are showing a decreasing trend, since the projects (as designed) have reached a stable status with occasional growth spurts when new innovations are added. e.g. kbld could be considered as a pure success if it never needs to change again until some new necessary use case is identified.
Adoption:
We have not done an active survey to find out the adoption trends.
Summary:
Carvel is still being maintained by few of the core maintainers and majority of work being done is to ensure bugs and CVEs are addressed. It remains critical for our products downstream.
Most of the tools are stable and mature. They are doing what they were set out to do and doing it reliably.
They are evolving at a steady pace. The t ools work well and support quite a bit of usage.
It would be ideal to have more than one organization to actively contribute to Carvel and to have a longer roadmap with active backlog and prioritization.
The current maintainers are committed to help grow the community and adoption of these tools. We are looking for help from the community and other partners to identify and solve problems of kubernetes management using these kubernetes native tools.

cc: @dims
Do let me know if there are further questions.

[linsun]

We would love to get a status update on this project given last update is few months old, @dims could you follow up with the project? Thanks!!

[dims]

@linsun ACK!