From in-house wrapper to CNCF project: A look at the open source beginnings of the opinionated, all-in-one CLI tool for building and deploying applications for Kubernetes.

The New Stack is a publication covering trends and technologies in cloud-native development, DevOps, and software delivery. Developers can learn about containerization, Kubernetes, and cloud computing, as well as explore topics such as microservices architecture, serverless computing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

The New Stack

Werf is an opinionated CLI tool for building container images and deploying to Kubernetes that evolved from a simple Docker wrapper in 2015 to a comprehensive CNCF Sandbox project. Starting as an in-house solution for a DevOps service provider, it integrated mainstream technologies like Git, Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes while enforcing best practices from real-world production experience. The project spawned several standalone open source tools including Nelm (a Helm fork), Trdl (secure software delivery), Kubedog (resource tracking), and Lockgate (distributed locking). After a decade of development, werf is now used in approximately 18,000 projects worldwide, primarily serving DevOps agencies and organizations requiring strict software delivery rules in Kubernetes environments.

A decade of werf, a software delivery tool for Kubernetes