Ender Demirkaya

We’re proud to announce that the Cadence project has joined the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)®, the open-source foundation that hosts and maintains critical components of modern cloud-native infrastructure including Kubernetes®, Prometheus®, and Envoy® under the Linux Foundation®.

Cadence is an open-source, fault-tolerant, and highly scalable workflow orchestration engine created at Uber to help developers build and run resilient applications. It’s been powering thousands of use cases at Uber and other companies. By managing distributed state, retries, scaling, and failure recovery, Cadence enables teams to focus on business logic rather than infrastructure complexity. Mission-critical applications across industries including finance, e-commerce, healthcare, and transportation depend on Cadence.

Joining CNCF marks a significant milestone for the Cadence project, emphasizing the project’s open source commitment. With its open governance, companies can join as maintainers and help improve long-term confidence. Increased transparency in roadmap and execution make upcoming features predictable.

Since its inception, the Cadence project’s ecosystem has reached over 150 companies and counting. Partners like NetApp® Instaclustr adopted the project and have offered it as a managed solution at scale. With CNCF’s support, the project aims to further its mission of simplifying distributed service development while delivering production-grade reliability at scale.

In the last several years, Cadence has made significant investments in its scalability, reliability, multitenancy, deployment safety, and portability, laying the necessary foundation to build enterprise-level features at scale, efficiently and reliably. It’s now a great time to build those features together, and we invite anyone to be a part of this future. Especially in the era of AI, Cadence will play a crucial role in durable orchestration.

What’s Changing in the Community?​

We’ll stop using our Slack workspace (uber-cadence.slack.com). Going forward, we’ll use CNCF’s Slack workspace (cloud-native.slack.com). Join this new workspace using Community Inviter and join the #cadence-users channel to contact us.

Our website (cadenceworkflow.io) and our GitHub org (github.com/cadence-workflow) will stay the same and we’ll continue sharing new features from there.

We’ll publish our roadmap at https://github.com/orgs/cadence-workflow/projects. We’ll hold community meetings to brainstorm about and prioritize upcoming features. Project tracking will move from internal tools to GitHub. Projects will have dedicated issues so you can track pull requests, updates, and timelines.

We’ll organize regular meetups (in-person and virtual) to showcase new features, have discussions, and learn from valuable guests.

For maintainers, we’ll hold regular meetings to update each other. If you’d like to become a maintainer, please contact us on Slack so we can help with starter tasks and larger projects as you gain experience.

How to Become a Maintainer?​

We invite companies that are already using Cadence, or plan to adopt it in the future, to become official maintainers and help shape this critical piece of infrastructure for your organization.

With this important milestone, we are prioritizing the addition of new maintainers and working to make the onboarding experience as smooth as possible. Our goal is to scale the project responsibly across all areas including development, decision making, efficiency, modernization, prioritization, and more.

If you are interested, please reach out to us in the #cadence-users channel mentioned above, and we will help you find suitable projects to contribute to. If you already have something in mind, feel free to open an issue in the appropriate repository under github.com/cadence-workflow.

Acknowledgments​

CNCF® and the CNCF logo design are registered trademarks of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Envoy®, Kubernetes®, Prometheus®, and their logos are registered trademarks of The Linux Foundation® in the United States and other countries. No endorsement by The Linux Foundation is implied by the use of these marks.

Instaclustr® and NetApp® are trademarks of NetApp, Inc.

Introduction​

If you haven’t heard about Cadence, this section is for you. In a short description, Cadence is a code-driven workflow orchestration engine. The definition itself may not tell enough, so it would help splitting it into three parts:

• What’s a workflow? (everyone has a different definition)
• Why does it matter to be code-driven?
• Benefits of Cadence

What is a Workflow?​

In the simplest definition, it is “a multi-step execution”. Step here represents individual operations that are a little heavier than small in-process function calls. Although they are not limited to those: it could be a separate service call, processing a large dataset, map-reduce, thread sleep, scheduling next run, waiting for an external input, starting a sub workflow etc. It’s anything a user thinks as a single unit of logic in their code. Those steps often have dependencies among themselves. Some steps, including the very first step, might require external triggers (e.g. button click) or schedules. In the more broader meaning, any multi-step function or service is a workflow in principle.

We released a user survey earlier this year to learn about who our users are, how they use Cadence, and how we can help them. It was shared from our Slack workspace, cadenceworkflow.io Blog and LinkedIn. After collecting the feedback, we wanted to share the results with our community. Thank you everyone for filling it out! Your feedback is invaluable and it helps us shape our roadmap for the future.

Here are some highlights in text and you can check out the visuals to get more details:

Most of the people who replied to our survey were engineers who were already using Cadence, actively evaluating, or migrating from a similar technology. This was exciting to hear! Some of you have contacted us to learn more about benchmarks, scale, and ideal use cases. We will share more guidelines about this but until then, feel free to contact us over our Slack workspace for guidance.