Hi Cadence Community,
At the beginning of every year, we share about what happened in the last year. Here’s a look back at our 2025 improvements, explaining what’s new, and how you can use them. 2025 was one of the most exciting years for the Cadence project and we hope this will only get better in the future. Here are some highlights:
Cadence is an open-source workflow orchestration platform. Our community currently includes more than 150 companies and it continues to grow. Many critical services are built with Cadence as it simplifies complex systems by separating business logic from its distributed system concerns.
Recently, Cadence was donated to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is a major step towards making it an industry standard and receiving support from all around the world. In other words, the Cadence project is now a Linux Foundation project, licensed under Apache v2 which allows anyone to use and extend it freely. The project operates with open, merit-based governance, giving everyone the opportunity to help shape its future.
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®.
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:
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.