Broadcom gives Velero to CNCF

Broadcom has handed Velero, a widely used Kubernetes backup tool, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox. (news.broadcom.com) The company announced the move on March 23 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam and said the project has already been accepted into the Sandbox. Broadcom said it will keep investing in enterprise Kubernetes support through VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service 3.6 and related partnerships. (news.broadcom.com) Velero backs up and restores Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes, the storage that keeps application data after a container stops. Its own documentation says teams use it for disaster recovery, scheduled backups, and moving workloads between clusters. (velero.io 1) (velero.io 2) Kubernetes can restart applications, but it does not include a built-in, cluster-wide system for backing up application state and attached data. Velero’s CNCF Sandbox filing says it works at the Kubernetes application programming interface layer and the storage snapshot layer, which makes restores more portable than relying only on control-plane database snapshots. (github.com) Broadcom said CNCF governance will put Velero under a vendor-neutral process with broader community input on technical direction. Chris Aniszczyk, the foundation’s chief technology officer, said Velero provides “a vital layer” for backup and disaster recovery as more organizations run stateful cloud-native workloads. (news.broadcom.com) That governance shift matters for a project that already has a large installed footprint in the Kubernetes world. The main Velero repository shows about 10,000 GitHub stars, roughly 1,500 forks, and more than 6,000 commits as of April 2026. (github.com) The project also has roots that predate Broadcom’s ownership of VMware. Velero was formerly called Heptio Ark, and the current project site still describes it as a VMware-backed open-source project while listing a public maintainer team and contribution path. (github.com) (velero.io) Under the hood, Velero stores backup and restore jobs as Kubernetes custom resources, then uses controllers to collect cluster objects and send backup data to object storage such as Amazon Simple Storage Service. Its documentation says it can also trigger volume snapshots and run pre-backup hooks, such as telling a database to flush data to disk first. (velero.io) Broadcom paired the donation with a pitch to enterprise operators who want longer-lived support around Kubernetes itself. In the same March 23 announcement, the company said VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service 3.6 adds Kubernetes 1.35 support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 compatibility, and upgrade and performance controls aimed at platform teams. (news.broadcom.com) For Velero users, the immediate change is not how backups run but who steers the project. The code stays open source; the roadmap now moves into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s entry-level governance track. (news.broadcom.com) (github.com)