Cloud Native Buildpacks graduates within the CNCF

2026-08-11 · Publisher : CNCF · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 11 August 2026, the CNCF announces the graduation of Cloud Native Buildpacks, the container image build standard born in 2018 at Pivotal and Heroku: 535 contributors from 164 organizations.

### Background On 11 August 2026, the CNCF announces the graduation of **Cloud Native Buildpacks**, a standard for building container images from source code, without writing a Dockerfile. Heroku open-sourced the buildpack model in 2012 and Cloud Foundry widely adopted it; Pivotal and Heroku created Cloud Native Buildpacks in January 2018, and the project joined the CNCF in October 2018. ### Key facts - 535 contributors from 164 organizations and more than 20 adopters, according to the CNCF. - Adopters cited: DigitalOcean, GitLab, Google, HashiCorp, Spring, VMware by Broadcom, Bloomberg and Salesforce. - Security argument: in enterprise deployments, vulnerability resolution time drops from weeks to hours, according to the CNCF (a measurement presented by the project). - The March 2026 CNCF and SlashData radar already placed Buildpacks in "Adopt" for workflow automation. ### Why it matters Buildpacks standardize image building: operating system or runtime updates are done by rebuilding the image without touching the code, which speeds up vulnerability fixes at scale. For an IT services firm, it is a credible option against home-grown Dockerfiles for large, homogeneous application fleets, with a modest adoption cost. The cited patch-time gains are project measurements, to confirm on one's own estate. ### Takeaway A supply-chain-security-oriented image build standard reaches the CNCF's most mature level.

Tags : Conteneurs, Sécurité, CI/CD, Open Source, Cloud natif