Behind the Scenes: How Maintaining Cloud Native Buildpacks Powers Platforms Like Heroku

Heroku-funded maintainers of the Cloud Native Buildpacks (CNB) pack CLI share what upstream open source maintenance actually looks like: 27 releases and 65+ PR reviews over 14 months, plus two major features—System Buildpacks and Execution Environments—that benefit every platform using CNBs, including Google Cloud Run, OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu. The post explains how the CNCF governance model lets competing companies collaborate on shared infrastructure while competing on developer experience, and previews upcoming work including Build Observability (RFC 0131), OCI Image Annotations, and removal of the Kaniko dependency. The authors also highlight a KubeCon EU 2026 session covering the road to CNB 1.0 and AI integration.