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.

122Projects
2.6MStars in total
+511Stars in a day

Hot right now

Most stars gained in a day · Oct 16

The all-time top

Top 100 of 122 · by stars

  1. #1 · ripienaar/free-for-dev

    free-for-dev

    A curated list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings that have free tiers useful for DevOps engineers, sysadmins, and infrastructure developers.

    139.7K
  2. #2 · kubernetes/kubernetes

    kubernetes

    Kubernetes (K8s) is an open source system for managing containerized applications across multiple hosts, handling the deployment, maintenance, and scaling of those applications.

    128.3K
  3. #3 · moby/moby

    moby

    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.

    72.2K
  1. 4

    traefik

    65.3Ktraefik/traefik · Go

    Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer built to make deploying and exposing microservices easy, with automatic configuration based on your infrastructure.

  2. 5

    minio

    61.3Kminio/minio · Go

    MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage server, built to power AI/ML, analytics, and other data-intensive workloads.

  3. 6

    etcd

    52.4Ketcd-io/etcd · Go

    A 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.

  4. 7

    ClickHouse

    50.5KClickHouse/ClickHouse · C++

    ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented database management system for generating analytical data reports in real time.

  5. 8

    kubernetes-the-hard-way

    50.4Kkelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

    A 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.

  6. 9

    serverless

    46.9Kserverless/serverless · JavaScript

    The 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.

  7. 10

    milvus

    46.4Kmilvus-io/milvus · Go

    Milvus 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.

  8. 11

    kong

    44.3KKong/kong · Lua

    Kong 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.

  9. 12

    tidb

    40.6Kpingcap/tidb · Go

    TiDB 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 14

    istio

    38.4Kistio/istio · Go

    Istio 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.

  12. 15

    keycloak

    37.4Kkeycloak/keycloak · Java

    Keycloak 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.

  13. 16

    rustfs

    35Krustfs/rustfs · Rust

    An 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.

  14. 17

    backstage

    34.6Kbackstage/backstage · TypeScript

    An 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.

  15. 18

    k3s

    34.2Kk3s-io/k3s · Go

    K3s 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.

  16. 19

    nacos

    33.5Kalibaba/nacos · Java

    Nacos is a platform from Alibaba for dynamic service discovery, configuration management, and service management, aimed at building cloud-native microservices and AI applications.

  17. 20

    go-zero

    33.4Kzeromicro/go-zero · Go

    go-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.

  18. 21

    cockroach

    32.6Kcockroachdb/cockroach · Go

    CockroachDB 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.

  19. 22

    helm

    30.3Khelm/helm · Go

    Helm 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.

  20. 23

    harbor

    29.6Kgoharbor/harbor · Go

    Harbor 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.

  21. 24

    spring-cloud-alibaba

    29.2Kalibaba/spring-cloud-alibaba · Java

    A 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.

  22. 25

    dapr

    26.2Kdapr/dapr · Go

    Dapr 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.

  23. 26

    incubator-seata

    26Kapache/incubator-seata · Java

    Apache Seata is an open source distributed transaction solution for microservices, designed to be high-performance and easy to use.

  24. 27

    rancher

    26Krancher/rancher · Go

    Rancher 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.

  25. 28

    kratos

    26Kgo-kratos/kratos · Go

    Kratos 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.

  26. 29

    cilium

    25.7Kcilium/cilium · Go

    Cilium is open-source networking, security, and observability software built on an eBPF dataplane, used mainly as the networking layer of Kubernetes clusters.

  27. 30

    TDengine

    25.2Ktaosdata/TDengine · C

    TDengine 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.

  28. 31

    skywalking

    25Kapache/skywalking · Java

    Apache 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.

  29. 32

    slim

    23.4Kslimtoolkit/slim · Go

    SlimToolkit (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.

  30. 33

    lens

    23.2Klensapp/lens

    Lens 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.

  31. 34

    neon

    23.2Kneondatabase/neon · Rust

    Neon 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.

  32. 35

    Sentinel

    23.1Kalibaba/Sentinel · Java

    Sentinel 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.

  33. 36

    distroless

    23.1KGoogleContainerTools/distroless · Starlark

    A 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.

  34. 37

    vector

    22.7Kvectordotdev/vector · Rust

    An 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.

  35. 38

    rocketmq

    22.6Kapache/rocketmq · Java

    Apache RocketMQ is an open-source distributed messaging and streaming platform for building event-driven applications, with low latency, trillion-level capacity and flexible scalability.

  36. 39

    openobserve

    22.4Kopenobserve/openobserve · TypeScript

    OpenObserve 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.

  37. 40

    serve

    21.9Kjina-ai/serve · Python

    Jina 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.

  38. 41

    containerd

    21.4Kcontainerd/containerd · Go

    containerd 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.

  39. 42

    vitess

    21.4Kvitessio/vitess · Go

    Vitess is a cloud-native distributed database system built around MySQL, designed for horizontal scaling.

  40. 43

    microservices-demo

    21.1KGoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo · Go

    Online 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.

  41. 44

    nats-server

    20.9Knats-io/nats-server · Go

    This 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.

  42. 45

    gofr

    20.8Kgofr-dev/gofr · Go

    An 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.

  43. 46

    shardingsphere

    20.8Kapache/shardingsphere · Java

    An 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.

  44. 47

    kubectx

    20Kahmetb/kubectx · Go

    Two 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.

  45. 48

    ingress-nginx

    19.5Kkubernetes/ingress-nginx · Go

    ingress-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.

  46. 49

    kubespray

    18.8Kkubernetes-sigs/kubespray · Jinja

    Kubespray is a set of Ansible playbooks that deploys a production-ready, highly available Kubernetes cluster on cloud VMs or your own bare-metal servers.

  47. 50

    sealos

    18.4Klabring/sealos · Go

    Sealos 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.

  48. 51

    apisix

    17.2Kapache/apisix · Lua

    Apache 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.

  49. 52

    kubesphere

    17.1Kkubesphere/kubesphere · Go

    KubeSphere 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.

  50. 53

    argo-workflows

    17Kargoproj/argo-workflows · Go

    An 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.

  51. 54

    nomad

    17Khashicorp/nomad · Go

    Nomad 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.

  52. 55

    tikv

    16.9Ktikv/tikv · Rust

    An 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.

  53. 56

    weaviate

    16.9Kweaviate/weaviate · Go

    Weaviate 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.

  54. 57

    dagster

    16.3Kdagster-io/dagster · Python

    Dagster 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.

  55. 58

    quarkus

    15.9Kquarkusio/quarkus · Java

    Quarkus is an open-source Java framework for writing cloud-native applications, built from the start with Linux containers in mind.

  56. 59

    kubeflow

    15.9Kkubeflow/kubeflow

    Kubeflow 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.

  57. 60

    skaffold

    15.9KGoogleContainerTools/skaffold · Go

    A 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.

  58. 61

    kaniko

    15.8KGoogleContainerTools/kaniko · Go

    It 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.

  59. 62

    kind

    15.6Kkubernetes-sigs/kind · Go

    kind (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.

  60. 63

    dashboard

    15.4Kkubernetes-retired/dashboard · Go

    Kubernetes 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.

  61. 64

    charts

    15.4Khelm/charts · Go

    This 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.

  62. 65

    juicefs

    14.5Kjuicedata/juicefs · Go

    JuiceFS 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.

  63. 66

    awesome-microservices

    14.5Kmfornos/awesome-microservices

    A 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.

  64. 67

    dolphinscheduler

    14.5Kapache/dolphinscheduler · Java

    Apache DolphinScheduler is a modern data orchestration platform for building and running complex data pipeline workflows with low-code, drag-and-drop tools.

  65. 68

    jib

    14.5KGoogleContainerTools/jib · Java

    Jib builds optimized Docker and OCI container images for Java applications without needing a Docker daemon or deep Docker expertise.

  66. 69

    coredns

    14.4Kcoredns/coredns · Go

    A 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.

  67. 70

    thanos

    14.2Kthanos-io/thanos · Go

    Thanos 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.

  68. 71

    awesome-aws

    14.2Kdonnemartin/awesome-aws · Python

    Awesome 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.

  69. 72

    cert-manager

    14.1Kcert-manager/cert-manager · Go

    cert-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.

  70. 73

    zuul

    14.1KNetflix/zuul · Java

    Zuul 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.

  71. 74

    kratos

    13.9Kory/kratos · Go

    An 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.

  72. 75

    OpenSearch

    13.9Kopensearch-project/OpenSearch · Java

    OpenSearch is an open-source, enterprise-grade search and observability suite built to search, analyze, and index unstructured data at scale.

  73. 76

    rook

    13.7Krook/rook · Go

    Rook is an open-source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes: it deploys and manages Ceph inside your cluster, turning Kubernetes itself into your storage platform.

  74. 77

    runc

    13.5Kopencontainers/runc · Go

    runc is a command-line tool for spawning and running containers on Linux according to the OCI (Open Container Initiative) specification.

  75. 78

    akka-core

    13.3Kakka/akka-core · Scala

    Akka 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.

  76. 79

    eureka

    12.7KNetflix/eureka · Java

    Eureka 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.

  77. 80

    encore

    12.5Kencoredev/encore · Go

    Encore 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.

  78. 81

    opa

    12.4Kopen-policy-agent/opa · Go

    OPA (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.

  79. 82

    ubicloud

    12.3Kubicloud/ubicloud · Ruby

    Ubicloud 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.

  80. 83

    starrocks

    12.2KStarRocks/starrocks · Java

    StarRocks 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.

  81. 84

    crossplane

    12.2Kcrossplane/crossplane · Go

    Crossplane 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.

  82. 85

    kubeshark

    12.1Kkubeshark/kubeshark · Go

    Kubeshark 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.

  83. 86

    meshery

    12Kmeshery/meshery · TypeScript

    Meshery 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.

  84. 87

    quickwit

    11.7Kquickwit-oss/quickwit · Rust

    Quickwit 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.

  85. 88

    kubernetes-handbook

    11.6Krootsongjc/kubernetes-handbook · Mermaid

    This 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.

  86. 89

    golang-open-source-projects

    11.6Khackstoic/golang-open-source-projects · Go

    A 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.

  87. 90

    linkerd2

    11.5Klinkerd/linkerd2 · Go

    Linkerd 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.

  88. 91

    talos

    11.4Ksiderolabs/talos · Go

    Talos 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.

  89. 92

    vcluster

    11.4Kloft-sh/vcluster · Go

    vCluster 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.

  90. 93

    dex

    11.2Kdexidp/dex · Go

    Dex 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.

  91. 94

    chalice

    11.1Kaws/chalice · Python

    Chalice 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.

  92. 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.

  93. 96

    certified-kubernetes-administrator-course

    10.9Kkodekloudhub/certified-kubernetes-administrator-course · Shell

    This 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.

  94. 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'.

  95. 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.

  96. 99

    distribution

    10.7Kdistribution/distribution · Go

    The 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.

  97. 100

    keda

    10.6Kkedacore/keda · Go

    KEDA 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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