This last year was a big one for the project. We grew significantly, matured our buildpack and stack offerings, and found new ways to engage with our users. For 2023, we hope for all of that and more.

We want to thank everyone who contributed to the project in 2022. Whether that was direct contibution to our codebases or feedback in the form of issues, discussions, or Slack messages, you’ve been a big part of the success we’ve had this year.

If you are looking to get involved with the project in 2023, we’d be happy to help through any of our communication channels. Find us on Github, Slack, Twitter, the project Mailing List, or at our weekly Working Group meetings.

The roadmap for this year has a lot of great ideas in it. Thank you to everyone that contributed their thoughts and helped us to outline the direction of the project. Let’s take a look at what’s coming up.

ARM64

This was easily the most requested item on the roadmap and for good reason. It feels like ARM64 is gaining big marketshare as it jumps from phones into workstations and server infrastructure. With the efforts to rebuild our stack and dependency management infrastructure in the rearview, figuring out how we can better support ARM64 builds seems like an obvious next step.

Check out the ongoing discussion topic for ARM64 to help us build out a plan.

Security and Transparency

In the last few years we’ve seen users grow to expect more with regards to the security profile of the tools they use. Developers increasingly are being called upon to know what code they are running in their build systems and to verify their authenticity. To that end, we’re going to spend some time this year focusing on delivering SBOMs, provenance data, and signatures for our release artifacts.

To get involved, join the discussion topic for this item.

Stacks and Builders

There were a number of items in the roadmap discussion related to stacks and builders. From introducing new versions of our existing Ubuntu stack to wholy new efforts to bring Red Hat UBI stacks to the project, its clear that 2023 will be another big year for stack development.

In the process, we’ll need to figure out some technical and scaling concerns so that we can easily support this growth in stacks. Specifically, we need to find ways to scale our builder development, both internally by finding a solution to the layer limits we are seeing in the Full builder, and externally by making buildpack stack compatibility more flexible through adoption of upstream CNB specifications.

Dependencies

In 2022, we paid down a huge amount of technical debt in our dependency management system. With that effort reaching its conclusion, its time to start considering what the next steps should be to improve the story for dependency installation process. Specifically, we’ve seen renewed interest in figuring out how to decouple buildpacks from the dependencies they install. Doing this will allow the project to more clearly articulate what the changes are in any given release.

Let’s get started!

Hopefully its clear that we have a lot of exciting and interesting work on the horizon for 2023. We’re gonna be working hard to make as much of this happen as possible and we’d love to see contributions from you!

If you want to get involved, please check out the 2023 Roadmap project board and join us on Slack or at our weekly Working Group meetings.

Here’s to 2023! 🎉