The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept OpenFeature as a CNCF incubating project. OpenFeature is an open specification that offers a vendor-agnostic, community-driven API for feature flagging, compatible with various feature flag management tools. Feature flags are a technique in software development that allows teams to enable, disable, or alter the behavior of certain features or code paths in a product or service without modifying the source code.

The standardization of feature flags through OpenFeature unifies tools and vendors behind a common interface, helping avoid vendor lock-in at the code level and providing a framework for building extensions and integrations that can be shared across the community.

“Specifications fill a unique place in cloud native. They allow adopters to experience consistent development and integration patterns to achieve a uniform functionality across platforms. However they have more challenges in adoption due to the need for a reference implementation,” said Emily Fox, TOC Sponsor for OpenFeature and senior principle software engineer at Red Hat. “OpenFeature taps into its talented contributor pool who manage community developed SDKs for reference implementations that provide adopters with a variety of options to meet their needs. Their commitment to collaboration for improving and expanding the specification will continue to allow the project to gain momentum as it begins its journey towards Graduation.”

Since joining the Sandbox in June 2022, OpenFeature has quickly gained support from vendors including LaunchDarkly, Split, CloudBees, and Flagsmith and end users including eBay, Google, SAP, and Spotify. It has also seen a 700% increase in repository stars, 350% increase in forks, and a 627% increase in Slack channel members.