Topics / #cloud-native
Cloud-native projects on GitHub
Architectures designed for cloud environments: microservices, containers, and elastic scaling.
As of , the most-starred Cloud-native projects on GitHub are free-for-dev (139.7K stars), kubernetes (128.3K stars) and moby (72.2K stars). GitHub.Locker tracks 122 Cloud-native repositories with 2.6M stars combined. The fastest-growing on October 16 was free-for-dev, with +60 stars in a day.
Hot right now
Most stars gained in a day · Oct 16
+60free-for-dev
ripienaar/free-for-dev · ★ 139.7KA curated list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings that have free tiers useful for DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and infrastructure developers.
rustfs
rustfs/rustfs · ★ 35KAn open-source, high-performance distributed object storage system written in Rust. It speaks the S3 API, is optimized for data lakes, AI and big data workloads, and supports migration and coexistence with MinIO and Ceph.
+36run-ai
dsx-ai-factory/run-ai · ★ 428NVIDIA Run:ai is an open-source AI workload and GPU orchestration platform for managing shared AI infrastructure on Kubernetes, handling GPU scheduling, resource quotas, and governance across teams.
keycloak
keycloak/keycloak · ★ 37.4KKeycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management solution that adds authentication and authorization to applications and services, so you do not need to build your own login, user storage, or permission logic.
The all-time top
Top 100 of 122 · by stars
- 139.7K
#1 · ripienaar/free-for-devfree-for-dev
A curated list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings that have free tiers useful for DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and infrastructure developers.
- 128.3K
#2 · kubernetes/kuberneteskubernetes
Kubernetes (K8s) is an open source system for managing containerized applications across multiple hosts, handling the deployment, maintenance, and scaling of those applications.
- 72.2K
#3 · moby/mobymoby
Moby is Docker's open-source upstream project: a 'Lego set' of toolkit components (build tools, registry, orchestration, runtime) plus a framework for assembling them into custom container-based systems.
- 4

traefik
65.3Ktraefik/traefik · GoTraefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer built to make deploying and exposing microservices easy, with automatic configuration based on your infrastructure.
- 5
minio
61.3Kminio/minio · GoMinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage server, built to power AI/ML, analytics, and other data-intensive workloads.
- 6
etcd
52.4Ketcd-io/etcd · GoA distributed, reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system, written in Go and kept consistent across machines with the Raft consensus algorithm.
- 7

ClickHouse
50.5KClickHouse/ClickHouse · C++ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database management system for generating analytical data reports in real time.
- 8

kubernetes-the-hard-way
50.4Kkelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-wayA step-by-step tutorial that walks you through bootstrapping a Kubernetes cluster manually, without any automation scripts, so you learn how every component actually works.
- 9

serverless
46.9Kserverless/serverless · JavaScriptThe Serverless Framework is a tool that lets you build and deploy applications on AWS Lambda and other managed cloud services, so they auto-scale, cost nothing when idle, and need minimal upkeep.
- 10
milvus
46.4Kmilvus-io/milvus · GoMilvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built to store and search embedding vectors at scale for AI applications like semantic search, RAG, and recommendation systems.
- 11

kong
44.3KKong/kong · LuaKong is a cloud-native API gateway that also acts as an AI and MCP gateway, handling routing, load balancing, authentication, and traffic management for microservices and LLM/agentic traffic.
- 12

tidb
40.6Kpingcap/tidb · GoTiDB is an open-source, cloud-native distributed SQL database written in Go — MySQL-compatible and built for high availability, horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and mixing transactions with analytics.
- 13

aspnetcore
38.5Kdotnet/aspnetcore · C#ASP.NET Core is an open-source, cross-platform framework from Microsoft for building modern cloud-connected applications like web apps, IoT apps, and mobile backends.
- 14
istio
38.4Kistio/istio · GoIstio is an open-source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications, giving you a uniform way to secure, connect, and monitor microservices with few or no code changes.
- 15
keycloak
37.4Kkeycloak/keycloak · JavaKeycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management solution that adds authentication and authorization to applications and services, so you do not need to build your own login, user storage, or permission logic.
- 16
rustfs
35Krustfs/rustfs · RustAn open-source, high-performance distributed object storage system written in Rust. It speaks the S3 API, is optimized for data lakes, AI and big data workloads, and supports migration and coexistence with MinIO and Ceph.
- 17

backstage
34.6Kbackstage/backstage · TypeScriptAn open source framework for building developer portals — one centralized place for your microservices, infrastructure tooling and documentation. Originally built at Spotify, now hosted by the CNCF.
- 18
k3s
34.2Kk3s-io/k3s · GoK3s is a lightweight, fully conformant, production-ready Kubernetes distribution packed into a single binary under 100 MB that runs with roughly half the memory of standard Kubernetes.
- 19

nacos
33.5Kalibaba/nacos · JavaNacos is a platform from Alibaba for dynamic service discovery, configuration management, and service management, aimed at building cloud-native microservices and AI applications.
- 20
go-zero
33.4Kzeromicro/go-zero · Gogo-zero is a cloud-native Go framework for building web and RPC microservices, packed with built-in engineering practices. It has been serving sites with tens of millions of users for years and is listed in the CNCF Landscape.
- 21

cockroach
32.6Kcockroachdb/cockroach · GoCockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built on a transactional, strongly-consistent key-value store, designed for high availability, horizontal scale, and surviving hardware failures without manual intervention.
- 22
helm
30.3Khelm/helm · GoHelm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It manages Charts — packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources — so installing and managing applications in a cluster works like apt, yum or homebrew on your system.
- 23

harbor
29.6Kgoharbor/harbor · GoHarbor is an open source trusted cloud native registry that stores, signs, and scans content — mainly container images and Helm charts. It is a CNCF-hosted project.
- 24

spring-cloud-alibaba
29.2Kalibaba/spring-cloud-alibaba · JavaA Spring Cloud toolkit from Alibaba: a one-stop set of components for building distributed Java applications on Alibaba middleware such as Nacos, Sentinel, RocketMQ and Seata.
- 25
dapr
26.2Kdapr/dapr · GoDapr is an open-source, CNCF-graduated runtime for building distributed applications, workflows, and AI agents. It packages durable execution, secure service-to-service communication, state management, and event-driven messaging behind one consistent set of APIs.
- 26

incubator-seata
26Kapache/incubator-seata · JavaApache Seata is an open source distributed transaction solution for microservices, designed to be high-performance and easy to use.
- 27

rancher
26Krancher/rancher · GoRancher is an open-source container management platform for organizations that run containers in production — it makes it easy to run Kubernetes anywhere and manage it from a web UI.
- 28

kratos
26Kgo-kratos/kratos · GoKratos is a lightweight Go framework for building cloud-native microservices, with small, explicit APIs so your code can focus on business logic instead of plumbing.
- 29

cilium
25.7Kcilium/cilium · GoCilium is open-source networking, security, and observability software built on an eBPF dataplane, used mainly as the networking layer of Kubernetes clusters.
- 30
TDengine
25.2Ktaosdata/TDengine · CTDengine is an open-source, high-performance, cloud-native, AI-powered time-series database built for IoT, Connected Cars, and Industrial IoT workloads, handling TB-to-PB scale data from billions of sensors.
- 31

skywalking
25Kapache/skywalking · JavaApache SkyWalking is an open-source APM (Application Performance Monitoring) system for monitoring, tracing and diagnosing distributed systems. It is built for microservices, cloud native and container-based architectures.
- 32

slim
23.4Kslimtoolkit/slim · GoSlimToolkit (formerly DockerSlim) is a free, open-source CLI toolkit that inspects, optimizes and debugs container images. It can shrink an image by up to 30x without you changing anything in your Dockerfile — and makes the result more secure too.
- 33
lens
23.2Klensapp/lensLens is a desktop IDE for Kubernetes — one context-aware UI for managing and troubleshooting clusters and workloads, and the most popular one out there, with over 1 million users.
- 34
neon
23.2Kneondatabase/neon · RustNeon is an open source serverless Postgres platform. It splits storage from compute and replaces the PostgreSQL storage layer with a distributed engine that spreads data across a cluster of nodes — which is what enables autoscaling, database branching, and scale to zero.
- 35

Sentinel
23.1Kalibaba/Sentinel · JavaSentinel is a flow control, traffic shaping, circuit breaking and system adaptive overload protection component for microservices, built and battle-tested at Alibaba across years of Double-11 shopping festivals.
- 36

distroless
23.1KGoogleContainerTools/distroless · StarlarkA set of minimal container base images that contain only your application and its runtime dependencies — no package managers, shells or other programs you would expect in a normal Linux distribution.
- 37
vector
22.7Kvectordotdev/vector · RustAn open-source, high-performance observability data pipeline: it collects, transforms, and routes your logs and metrics to any vendors you choose, so you keep control of your observability data. It is maintained by Datadog's Community Open Source Engineering team.
- 38

rocketmq
22.6Kapache/rocketmq · JavaApache RocketMQ is an open-source distributed messaging and streaming platform for building event-driven applications, with low latency, trillion-level capacity and flexible scalability.
- 39
openobserve
22.4Kopenobserve/openobserve · TypeScriptOpenObserve is an open-source, cloud-native observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, frontend monitoring (RUM), session replay and AI/LLM observability — a cost-effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk and Elasticsearch.
- 40

serve
21.9Kjina-ai/serve · PythonJina is an open-source Python framework for building multimodal AI applications on a cloud-native stack — you wrap models into gRPC microservices, chain them into flows, and scale from local to cloud.
- 41

containerd
21.4Kcontainerd/containerd · Gocontainerd is an industry-standard container runtime — a daemon for Linux and Windows that manages the complete container lifecycle of its host: image transfer and storage, container execution and supervision, and low-level storage and network attachments. It's a CNCF graduated project.
- 42
vitess
21.4Kvitessio/vitess · GoVitess is a cloud-native distributed database system built around MySQL, designed for horizontal scaling.
- 43

microservices-demo
21.1KGoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo · GoOnline Boutique is a sample cloud-first e-commerce web app made of 11 microservices in different languages, built by Google to demonstrate Kubernetes, gRPC, Istio and other Google Cloud technologies.
- 44

nats-server
20.9Knats-io/nats-server · GoThis is the NATS server — the high-performance core of NATS.io, a messaging system for connecting digital systems, services and devices. It's a CNCF project.
- 45

gofr
20.8Kgofr-dev/gofr · GoAn opinionated Go framework for building microservices fast — database support and observability (logs, traces, metrics) come built in, so you write service code instead of infrastructure glue.
- 46
shardingsphere
20.8Kapache/shardingsphere · JavaAn Apache Top-Level Project positioned as 'Database Plus': a layer built over your existing heterogeneous databases that adds distributed SQL - sharding, read/write splitting, encryption - without making you replace them.
- 47

kubectx
20Kahmetb/kubectx · GoTwo tiny command-line helpers for kubectl: kubectx switches between your Kubernetes clusters (contexts) and kubens switches the active namespace — no more typing long kubectl config commands.
- 48
ingress-nginx
19.5Kkubernetes/ingress-nginx · Goingress-nginx was an Ingress controller for Kubernetes that used NGINX as a reverse proxy and load balancer to route traffic into clusters. The project is now retired.
- 49

kubespray
18.8Kkubernetes-sigs/kubespray · JinjaKubespray is a set of Ansible playbooks that deploys a production-ready, highly available Kubernetes cluster on cloud VMs or your own bare-metal servers.
- 50

sealos
18.4Klabring/sealos · GoSealos is an AI-native cloud operating system built on Kubernetes. It unifies the whole application lifecycle — from development in cloud IDEs to production deployment and management — targeting AI apps, SaaS platforms and microservices.
- 51

apisix
17.2Kapache/apisix · LuaApache APISIX is an open-source, dynamic, real-time, high-performance API Gateway that also serves as an AI Gateway. It provides traffic management — load balancing, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability — for both north-south and east-west traffic.
- 52

kubesphere
17.1Kkubesphere/kubesphere · GoKubeSphere is a container platform built on Kubernetes for managing cloud-native apps across multi-cloud, datacenter, and edge environments. It adds a developer-friendly web console, multi-tenancy, DevOps workflows, and a plug-and-play extension ecosystem on top of your clusters.
- 53

argo-workflows
17Kargoproj/argo-workflows · GoAn open source, container-native workflow engine for Kubernetes: it orchestrates parallel jobs where every step of your workflow runs as a container. It is a CNCF graduated project.
- 54
nomad
17Khashicorp/nomad · GoNomad is a workload orchestrator from HashiCorp that deploys and manages containers, non-containerized apps, and virtual machines across on-prem and cloud infrastructure at scale.
- 55

tikv
16.9Ktikv/tikv · RustAn open-source, distributed, transactional key-value database. Unlike traditional NoSQL systems, it offers not only classical key-value APIs but also transactional APIs with ACID compliance.
- 56

weaviate
16.9Kweaviate/weaviate · GoWeaviate is an open-source, cloud-native vector database: it stores objects and vectors together and lets you combine vector search with structured filtering for semantic search at scale.
- 57
dagster
16.3Kdagster-io/dagster · PythonDagster is a cloud-native data pipeline orchestrator covering the whole development lifecycle: it builds, runs, and observes data assets like tables, datasets, ML models, and reports, with built-in lineage and observability.
- 58

quarkus
15.9Kquarkusio/quarkus · JavaQuarkus is an open-source Java framework for writing cloud-native applications, built from the start with Linux containers in mind.
- 59
kubeflow
15.9Kkubeflow/kubeflowKubeflow is the foundation of tools for building AI platforms on Kubernetes, covering every stage of the AI lifecycle through a set of composable, Kubernetes-native subprojects.
- 60

skaffold
15.9KGoogleContainerTools/skaffold · GoA command line tool that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications: you iterate on your source code locally and it handles the workflow for building, pushing and deploying to local or remote clusters.
- 61

kaniko
15.8KGoogleContainerTools/kaniko · GoIt builds container images from a Dockerfile inside a container or Kubernetes cluster, without needing a Docker daemon — handy in places where a daemon can't run securely, like a standard Kubernetes cluster.
- 62

kind
15.6Kkubernetes-sigs/kind · Gokind (Kubernetes IN Docker) runs local Kubernetes clusters using Docker containers as 'nodes'. It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself, but also works for local development or CI.
- 63

dashboard
15.4Kkubernetes-retired/dashboard · GoKubernetes Dashboard is a general-purpose, web-based UI for Kubernetes clusters. From a browser you can manage the applications running in the cluster, troubleshoot them, and manage the cluster itself.
- 64

charts
15.4Khelm/charts · GoThis was the canonical repository of community-curated Helm charts (stable and incubator) for installing applications on Kubernetes via Helm 2/3. It is now archived and obsolete, superseded by Artifact Hub.
- 65
juicefs
14.5Kjuicedata/juicefs · GoJuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system that stores data in object storage (like S3) and metadata in a database engine (like Redis), letting you use massive cloud storage as if it were a local disk.
- 66

awesome-microservices
14.5Kmfornos/awesome-microservicesA curated list of Microservice Architecture related principles and technologies — a link catalog of platforms, frameworks, toolkits, standards and further reading for building service-oriented systems.
- 67

dolphinscheduler
14.5Kapache/dolphinscheduler · JavaApache DolphinScheduler is a modern data orchestration platform for building and running complex data pipeline workflows with low-code, drag-and-drop tools.
- 68

jib
14.5KGoogleContainerTools/jib · JavaJib builds optimized Docker and OCI container images for Java applications without needing a Docker daemon or deep Docker expertise.
- 69

coredns
14.4Kcoredns/coredns · GoA fast and flexible DNS server and forwarder written in Go, built as a chain of plugins — each plugin performs one DNS function. It is a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.
- 70

thanos
14.2Kthanos-io/thanos · GoThanos is a set of components that turn existing Prometheus deployments into a highly available metric system with unlimited storage capacity. It is a CNCF Incubating project written in Go.
- 71

awesome-aws
14.2Kdonnemartin/awesome-aws · PythonAwesome AWS is a curated list of AWS resources - official and community SDKs, CLI tools, open source repos, guides, books, blogs, and training material - organized by language and AWS service.
- 72

cert-manager
14.1Kcert-manager/cert-manager · Gocert-manager adds certificates and certificate issuers as resource types in Kubernetes, automating the process of obtaining, renewing, and using TLS certificates for workloads in a cluster.
- 73

zuul
14.1KNetflix/zuul · JavaZuul is Netflix's L7 (application-layer) gateway service that handles dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security for traffic flowing into a set of backend services.
- 74
kratos
13.9Kory/kratos · GoAn open source, API-first identity and user management server for cloud-native apps: it centralizes login, registration, recovery, verification, and profile management so your app doesn't reimplement them.
- 75
OpenSearch
13.9Kopensearch-project/OpenSearch · JavaOpenSearch is an open-source, enterprise-grade search and observability suite built to search, analyze, and index unstructured data at scale.
- 76
rook
13.7Krook/rook · GoRook is an open-source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes: it deploys and manages Ceph inside your cluster, turning Kubernetes itself into your storage platform.
- 77
runc
13.5Kopencontainers/runc · Gorunc is a command-line tool for spawning and running containers on Linux according to the OCI (Open Container Initiative) specification.
- 78

akka-core
13.3Kakka/akka-core · ScalaAkka is a platform for building highly responsive, resilient and scalable distributed services; this repo holds its core libraries. It is used for transactional, analytical, agentic-AI, digital-twin, IoT and edge-to-cloud systems.
- 79

eureka
12.7KNetflix/eureka · JavaEureka is a RESTful service used mainly in AWS cloud environments for service discovery, load balancing, and failover of mid-tier servers, originally built for Netflix's own infrastructure.
- 80
encore
12.5Kencoredev/encore · GoEncore is an open-source backend platform: you declare resources like databases, Pub/Sub and caches directly in code, run the whole system locally with real infrastructure, and deploy into your own AWS or GCP account.
- 81

opa
12.4Kopen-policy-agent/opa · GoOPA (Open Policy Agent) is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that lets you enforce policies — like 'can user X do Y on resource Z?' — consistently across your whole stack via a declarative policy language called Rego.
- 82
ubicloud
12.3Kubicloud/ubicloud · RubyUbicloud is an open source cloud platform that runs on bare metal servers, offering elastic compute, non-replicated block storage, firewall and load balancer, managed Postgres, Kubernetes, AI inference, and IAM services as an open alternative to AWS.
- 83

starrocks
12.2KStarRocks/starrocks · JavaStarRocks is an open-source, high-performance query engine for sub-second, ad-hoc analytics on data warehouses and data lakes, built as a Linux Foundation project.
- 84

crossplane
12.2Kcrossplane/crossplane · GoCrossplane is a framework for building cloud native control planes without writing code. It orchestrates applications and infrastructure across any environment through a declarative, Kubernetes-style API.
- 85
kubeshark
12.1Kkubeshark/kubeshark · GoKubeshark is an eBPF-powered network observability tool for Kubernetes that captures and indexes L4/L7 traffic with full Kubernetes context, decrypts TLS without managing keys, and lets both humans and AI agents query the data.
- 86
meshery
12Kmeshery/meshery · TypeScriptMeshery is a cloud native management plane that lets you configure, deploy, and visually manage Kubernetes clusters and other cloud native infrastructure across multiple clouds from one place.
- 87
quickwit
11.7Kquickwit-oss/quickwit · RustQuickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine built for observability - log management and distributed tracing - that runs sub-second search directly on cloud storage like S3.
- 88

kubernetes-handbook
11.6Krootsongjc/kubernetes-handbook · MermaidThis is a free Chinese-language ebook/handbook that teaches Kubernetes architecture and the cloud-native ecosystem, from container orchestration basics up through service mesh, serverless, and AI-native infrastructure.
- 89

golang-open-source-projects
11.6Khackstoic/golang-open-source-projects · GoA curated, Chinese-language directory of Go open-source projects (a Chinese version of awesome-go), reorganized to highlight projects that are still maintained and useful for learning or technology selection.
- 90

linkerd2
11.5Klinkerd/linkerd2 · GoLinkerd is an ultralight, security-first service mesh for Kubernetes that adds encryption, observability, and reliability features to your cluster's traffic without requiring any code changes to your apps.
- 91
talos
11.4Ksiderolabs/talos · GoTalos is a modern Linux-based operating system built specifically for running Kubernetes: secure, immutable, and minimal, with all system management done through an API instead of a shell.
- 92

vcluster
11.4Kloft-sh/vcluster · GovCluster creates Tenant Clusters: fully isolated virtual Kubernetes clusters, each with its own API server, CRDs, and RBAC, running on top of an existing Kubernetes cluster or standalone on bare metal.
- 93

dex
11.2Kdexidp/dex · GoDex is an identity service that drives authentication for other apps over OpenID Connect. Through pluggable 'connectors' it defers logins to LDAP, SAML or providers like GitHub and Google, so clients write their auth logic once.
- 94

chalice
11.1Kaws/chalice · PythonChalice is a Python framework for writing serverless apps: you write ordinary Python functions, and it creates and deploys the AWS Lambda functions and REST APIs behind them.
- 95

eShop
11Kdotnet/eShop · C#A reference .NET application implementing an e-commerce website ('AdventureWorks') using a services-based microservices architecture built on .NET Aspire.
- 96

certified-kubernetes-administrator-course
10.9Kkodekloudhub/certified-kubernetes-administrator-course · ShellThis is a collection of notes and resources from the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) course hosted on KodeKloud, covering every exam topic from core concepts to networking and troubleshooting.
- 97

orleans
10.9Kdotnet/orleans · C#Orleans is a cross-platform .NET framework for building robust, scalable distributed applications — from a single on-premises server up to globally distributed, highly available cloud services. It's often referred to as 'Distributed .NET'.
- 98

WasmEdge
10.8KWasmEdge/WasmEdge · C++WasmEdge is a lightweight, high-performance, extensible WebAssembly runtime built for cloud-native, edge, and decentralized applications, powering serverless apps, microservices, smart contracts, and IoT devices.
- 99
distribution
10.7Kdistribution/distribution · GoThe open source registry implementation for storing and distributing container images and other content — the toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content, built on the OCI Distribution Specification.
- 100

keda
10.6Kkedacore/keda · GoKEDA is a Kubernetes-based event driven autoscaling component — it automatically scales any container running in a Kubernetes cluster based on events.
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