History
Origin
Cadence was built at Uber's Seattle office starting in 2015, when Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas joined forces to create it. Both had worked on the same problem before: AWS Simple Workflow Service and the Azure Durable Task Framework. Cadence reimplemented that idea of durable execution as a self-hosted system on a different stack (ia40 interview).
The code was open-sourced in 2017. The README still states the project has been an "open-source platform since 2017" (README.md:8), and the GitHub repository was created on 2017-02-21. Inside Uber the platform grew from zero to roughly 100 use cases in three years, and external companies such as HashiCorp, Coinbase, and DoorDash picked it up (ia40 interview).
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Fateev and Abbas begin Cadence at Uber Seattle (ia40). |
| 2017 | Open-sourced; GitHub repository created 2017-02-21 (README.md:8). |
| 2019 | The two creators leave Uber, found Temporal, and fork Cadence (Amplify Partners). |
| 2025 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2025-05-22 (CNCF). |
| 2026 | Latest stable release v1.4.0 on 2026-02-27. |
How it evolved
The largest fork in the project's history is literal. In 2019 the two original creators left Uber and founded Temporal, forking the Cadence codebase (Amplify Partners). Temporal moved its wire format from Thrift to protobuf and its transport from a custom RPC to gRPC, and it ships under the MIT license. The shared lineage is still visible inside the Cadence tree: source files carry a copyright line attributing portions of the software to Temporal Technologies (service/history/engine/engineimpl/start_workflow_execution.go:2).
Cadence stayed under Uber's stewardship and continued to evolve as an Apache-2.0 project. The Go module path is still github.com/uber/cadence (go.mod:1), a holdover from the original ownership, even though the GitHub organization is now cadence-workflow.
In May 2025 Uber donated Cadence to the CNCF, where it was accepted as a Sandbox project (Uber Blog, cncf/sandbox issue #368). The repository moved to the cadence-workflow GitHub organization and community chat moved to the #cadence-users channel in the CNCF Slack workspace.
Where it stands now
Cadence is a CNCF Sandbox project with a neutral host, governed by a Technical Steering Committee of four plus a set of maintainers (MAINTAINERS.md). It builds on Go 1.24 (go.mod:3). The latest stable release is v1.4.0 (2026-02-27), with prerelease tags such as v1.4.1-prerelease31 cut on top. The project ships official Go and Java SDKs and a web UI as separate repositories, and the server engine documented here remains the actively developed core.