Before we share the big plans we have for 2022, the Paketo Buildpacks Steering Committee would like to thank everyone that joined in the 2022 roadmap discussion, as well as everyone that’s provided feedback across all of the Paketo Buildpacks in 2021. The team is grateful for all of the feedback that we receive, as it helps to shape the project and ensure we’re building the tools that everyone wants to use.

By the way, if you’ve not yet connected with the project, please consider giving it a try in 2022. The Paketo community is a welcoming, inclusive group and we’re happy to discuss any ideas and suggestions you might have. We’re available across a number of channels (Github, Slack, Twitter, Mailing List, Working Group meetings, etc.).

After reviewing all the wonderful feedback we received, the Steering Committee has decided to focus on the following areas for 2022.

Improving and Expanding our Base Image / Stack / Builder Offering

To date, the Paketo project has maintained three sets of compatible base images, stacks, and builders. These are all based on Ubuntu Bionic and are named tiny, base, and full. We have heard from the community that they would like to have more offerings available.

As such, we’re planning some tracks of work to:

• Revamp our base image, stack, and builder publishing toolkit. Before we can scale up our efforts, we need to make sure we have tools capable of delivering at the necessary scale.
• Publish a full suite of images for Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish (22.04). The current Ubuntu Bionic suite of images are approaching their end-of-life. Ubuntu Jammy will be the successor.
• Release official images with support for building on ARM64. Whether it be your shiny new M1 Mac or a move to ARM64 in your datacenter, more folks are switching and we plan to follow suit.
• Publish a full suite of Paketo stack images compatible with IBM RedHat’s Universal Base Image (UBI).

Improving the Buildpack Authoring Experience

A major focus in the Paketo project is on providing a high-quality set of buildpacks for our users, so much so that we’ve neglected to make it easy for those interested in contributing. Another big focus this year will be on lowering the barrier to entry for those that want to contribute to the project. We love when folks want to contribute, so we want to facilitate that process and make it as easy as possible.

This effort will include improving our developer documentation, reducing friction in our project’s processes, making it more clear where folks can help, and working to consolidate differences in tooling/libraries.

If you are interested in helping out with the project, or have an idea you’d like to see implemented, please reach out. The team is happy to help discuss ideas, implementation strategies, and help you get started on your contribution. The project’s communication channels are all listed on our community page.

Improvements to Dependency Management and Caching

A primary responsibility of buildpacks is to install dependencies. Thus how we manage and cache those dependencies can have a large impact on the user’s experience. We have identified a couple of areas where we believe the project can improve dependency management and caching and we are targeting those for 2022.

• Increase the flexibility in the way that buildpacks are loading dependencies, making it easier to change dependencies or host your own.
• Reduce the frequency at which dependencies need to be downloaded and cache them more aggressively.
• Improve the project’s dependency tracking processes, reducing overhead and enabling dependency updates to be published more quickly.

Onward 2022

We hope that you’re as excited as we are about all of the great work on Paketo Buildpacks that’s been done in 2021 and that’s to come in 2022! If you’re interested in following our efforts for 2022, you might consider joining the Paketo Slack or joining our monthly roadmap review session (occuring on the first Tuesday of each month). That’s a good chance to check in, see what the team is up to, ask questions, and see how we’re progressing towards our goals.