Broadcom Donates Velero to the CNCF Sandbox, Shifting Kubernetes Backup Governance to the Community
Broadcom has contributed Velero, the Kubernetes-native backup and disaster recovery tool with 9,900 GitHub stars, to the CNCF Sandbox after the Technical Oversight Committee approved the proposal filed in February 2026.
Overview
Broadcom has donated Velero, the widely adopted Kubernetes-native backup, restore, and migration tool, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Sandbox project. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee approved the proposal on March 17, 2026, following a submission filed by Broadcom engineers on February 6, according to SiliconAngle. The announcement was made at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam on March 23.
The move transitions Velero from Broadcom’s corporate stewardship to vendor-neutral, community-driven governance under the CNCF, a shift that the foundation’s CTO Chris Aniszczyk framed in terms of growing enterprise needs. “As organizations scale their cloud native workloads, the focus is shifting from simple orchestration to long-term resilience and data management,” Aniszczyk said in the VMware Cloud Foundation blog.
What Velero Does
Velero provides Kubernetes-native tools to back up and restore cluster resources and persistent volumes, addressing a capability that Kubernetes itself does not offer out of the box. Unlike etcd snapshots that capture only the control-plane datastore, Velero operates at the Kubernetes API layer, enabling portable, application-aware backup and recovery that works consistently across cloud providers, on-premises environments, and Kubernetes distributions.
The tool supports scheduled backups with retention policies, pre- and post-backup hooks for custom actions, CSI volume snapshots, and file-level backups via the Kopia uploader. Its pluggable architecture accommodates storage backends from major cloud providers as well as S3-compatible on-premises systems. The project consists of a server component running inside the cluster and a command-line client for operators.
Velero v1.18.0, released on March 6, 2026, supports Kubernetes versions 1.18 through 1.35. The project has accumulated roughly 9,900 GitHub stars and 1,500 forks, and is written almost entirely in Go under an Apache 2.0 license.
Project History
Velero originated as Heptio Ark, created by Heptio, the Kubernetes startup co-founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the three creators of Kubernetes at Google. After VMware acquired Heptio in 2018, the project was renamed Velero and maintained under the vmware-tanzu GitHub organization. Broadcom inherited the project through its acquisition of VMware, which closed in November 2023.
Prashanth Shenoy, CMO of Broadcom’s cloud platform group, described the strategic rationale for the donation. “Velero is critical for organizations because Kubernetes, by default, doesn’t provide built-in cluster-level backup or recovery,” Shenoy said, according to SiliconAngle. The platform helps organizations “protect their stateful applications and data, recover quickly from outages or failures.”
What Sandbox Status Means
The CNCF Sandbox is the foundation’s entry-level tier for early-stage and newly contributed projects, providing legal support, mentorship, and visibility within the cloud native ecosystem. Projects can later advance to incubating and then graduated status as they demonstrate broader adoption, mature governance, and production readiness.
Sandbox acceptance required approval from the CNCF TOC, and the Velero proposal received endorsements from maintainers at Broadcom, Red Hat, and Microsoft during the review period. Velero’s existing governance structure already incorporated CNCF-aligned principles, including consensus-based decision making with supermajority voting and lazy consensus with five-day review periods, according to Broadcom’s announcement.
Dilpreet Bindra of Broadcom emphasized the company’s broader Kubernetes commitment: “We’re not just users of Kubernetes, we’re builders and we make Kubernetes easier to run, not harder,” as reported by Broadcom.
Broader Context
The Velero donation is part of a pattern of major vendors contributing proprietary Kubernetes tooling to open foundations. At the same KubeCon Europe event, NVIDIA donated its GPU Dynamic Resource Allocation driver to the Kubernetes project, and Google open-sourced the GKE Cluster Autoscaler. Earlier in March, Kyverno reached CNCF graduation, and Tekton was accepted as a CNCF incubating project after seven years at the Continuous Delivery Foundation.
Broadcom accompanied the Velero announcement with the release of VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service 3.6, which adds Kubernetes 1.35 support with 24-month extended version support, RHEL 9 compatibility, declarative TuneD profiles for kernel tuning, and nftables backend support for kube-proxy, according to SiliconAngle. The company also expanded validated integrations with F5 BIG-IP, Kong API Gateway, and Tigera Calico Enterprise.
What Remains to Be Seen
Velero enters the CNCF at the sandbox tier despite years of production use and broad enterprise adoption. How quickly the project will pursue incubation or graduation status under CNCF governance remains an open question. The transition also raises practical considerations around the project’s GitHub organization — currently vmware-tanzu — and whether maintainer composition will shift as vendor-neutral governance takes hold.