Month in Metrics: August 2026

This is the first in a monthly series pulled straight from the numbers behind /metrics and /architectures — no editorializing, just what changed and where the data comes from.

The landscape, by the numbers

As of the latest CNCF Landscape sync, there are 254 CNCF projects carrying an official maturity level, spanning categories from Provisioning (64 projects) to newer areas like Wasm and Inference (3 each). That range is the clearest signal of how far "cloud native" has spread beyond its container-orchestration roots.

Reference architectures: steady growth

The cncf/architecture repository — the source for every reference architecture on this site — has grown from 5 submitted architectures in September 2024 to 27 by June 2026. Seven of those are currently published on this site, reviewed through the End User TAB's submission process.

Behind that growth is an active review pipeline. Per the TAB's public submission tracking, there are currently 13 open submissions and 5 open architecture pull requests, with a median public PR cycle (creation to merge) of about 1.2 days once a PR is opened — though the median time an open submission issue has been waiting is 103.7 days, underscoring that the bottleneck is authoring and review, not process throughput.

Reading these numbers yourself

Every figure above traces back to an authoritative source — the Metrics page links each one, and nothing here is asserted without a source URL. If a number can't be sourced, it's left out entirely (a handful of figures, like end-user member counts and Slack membership, currently are, for exactly that reason).

Bring your own architecture

If your organization has a production cloud native story worth documenting, the reference architecture submission process is how it ends up in next month's numbers.